


Swaying From Season to Season

by Xairathan



Category: Fate/Grand Order, Fate/stay night & Related Fandoms
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-14
Updated: 2019-12-10
Packaged: 2021-01-30 15:07:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 6
Words: 31,729
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21430201
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Xairathan/pseuds/Xairathan
Summary: The winds of each season graced you beautifully / Take me with you, towards that faraway dream within a dream
Relationships: Oda Nobunaga | Archer/Okita Souji | Sakura Saber, Oda Nobunaga/Okita Souji | Demon Archer/Sakura Saber
Comments: 10
Kudos: 87





	1. Winter

**Author's Note:**

> I legit tried so hard to name this anything that wasn't 'Swaying From Season to Season' because I already have an anthology named that but yknow what if it Ain't Broke, Don't Fix It.
> 
> This is the idea that's been eating at me for the past month or two.
> 
> I'm also invoking my curse and posting this before it's actually complete because if anything I write is going to get completed it's gonna be this and if it doesn't then I have literally no rights.

**1635**

Nothing has interested Nobunaga since Ieyasu died. It’s by no means a romantic sentiment: she’d valued him as a loyal retainer and general, but no more. His death is just one more opening in an inexorable void, everything Nobunaga knows swallowed up by it. On the day Ieyasu died, Nobunaga abandoned the streets of Kyoto for the hills, and would’ve wandered further if it weren’t for her unseen tethers.

Nothing has interested Nobunaga like this samurai spinning deadly circles beneath the trees. A thousand fractals of silver flash in her hands, reflecting the light of the sun and the snow. Her sandals wear a pattern in the frost down to the nettle-clothed earth. Her breath emerges in colorless bursts, and is eaten up by the empty sky. Nobunaga, watching hidden from behind a tree, feels her body lighten for the first time in decades. For a moment, she’s not Oda Nobunaga; she’s Oda Kippoushi, peering out from the treeline at the girls by the river, their bodies and the sparkle of the sun off the water seared into her mind.

The samurai works through another measured turn. Her eyes are the warm gold of gilded skulls and jasmine tea. She watches everything from the placement of her hands to the rise of her blade. Nobunaga, enraptured, so used to being ignored, forgets for a moment where she is.

(No, not quite. Nobunaga, a strategist, has always been mindful of the weather. She’s even more wary of snow. The truth is, Nobunaga wants to be seen.)

Bright eyes catch the outline of Nobunaga’s body, racing along it like a flame. The sword is drawn back, tight against the samurai’s shoulders, ready to strike.

“Who are you?” Even the samurai’s voice is controlled. Nobunaga recognizes the sound of a lower register being forced through. “Why are you here?”

“Hey, relax.” Nobunaga steps out of cover, palms held placatingly outward. Her katana bangs against her side, metal-tipped sheath tapping her greaves. She sees the samurai’s brows knit with confusion. Of course- the form Nobunaga’s chosen to take isn’t traditional by any means. “We’re not at war anymore.”

“You could still be an assassin, or a spy.” The samurai’s gaze locks on to Nobunaga’s hat. Nobunaga imagines, in that moment, what her eyes might look like up close. Full, the five petals of the Oda crest blossoming out from shrunken pupils. Beautiful, for so many reasons. A vision Nobunaga hasn’t seen in so long, and can barely hold together a dream of. “You’re an Oda,” she says, blade lowering slightly.

“That I am!” Nobunaga answers.

“I didn’t know they trained their daughters, too.” The samurai lets her sword arm sink back to her side, though she keeps her weapon out. Nobunaga admires her wariness. In the age that Nobunaga’s left behind, she might have made a fine retainer. “Or are you here to practice in secret like me?”

“Why would you need to hide?” Nobunaga gestures at the other woman’s garb, kimono and neatly tied hakama, a ribbon holding back her hair. “You’re obviously of the warrior class.”

“But women aren’t supposed to fight, isn’t that right?”

“That’s true,” Nobunaga laughs, genuine mirth rumbling in an undercurrent through her voice. She would know; she’d lost a brother and more to such a way of thinking. It’s of him she thinks of, and of a wife sent to kill her, and of a warlord she’d once dreaded and respected that she wishes she’d had the chance to meet on the battlefield, to see if she was truly _ like Nobunaga_. “There are many things women shouldn’t be doing.”

“Like practicing their swordsmanship.”

“Like being so poorly dressed in the winter!” Nobunaga steps forward, shedding her coat, holding it out in a single irreverent hand. “If you’re going to be out here for so long, then take this. It’d be a shame if someone as beautiful caught your death of cold!”

“What about you?” the samurai inches closer to Nobunaga, almost as if she expects Nobunaga to spring some sort of trap. “Won’t you be cold, then?”

“Nope,” Nobunaga grins and tugs at her inner layer, a Western-style button-up shirt. “This is way warmer than it looks.”

Of course, she’s lying. Coat or not, Nobunaga would still be warm. She can’t recall a time since Honnouji that she hasn’t been warm.

“How will you get it back, then?”

“Do you come here often?” The samurai nods, accepting Nobunaga’s coat with a careful curling of her fingers. “Then the next time we meet, you can give it back to me. But if you want to keep it until spring, that’s fine, too!”

“If you’re certain.” The samurai hefts the coat in her hands, seemingly testing for something. Perhaps weight, perhaps texture. “If you want it back sooner, come by my family’s household. I’m from the Okita.”

“Okita, huh?” Nobunaga rolls the name around in her mouth, much like Okita had handled her coat. “I’ll remember that. For now, I’ll leave you to your training. You looked like you were pretty into it.”

Okita sheathes her katana, nodding. She threads her arms into Nobunaga’s coat, one at a time, pausing as it settles over her. Then, she doesn’t move. Nobunaga doesn’t either, wondering if the surge of her fire runs through the clothes that hung from her body as much as her blood. Okita’s cheeks fill with pink, and she fumbles with the buttons. The upturned collar only provides so much protection from Nobunaga’s stare. She doesn’t tell Nobunaga to leave, she doesn’t draw her weapon. Uncertain fingers thread each button through its opposite hole. When she’s done is when Nobunaga turns to leave, the cadence of her feet meeting the snowy hillside matching the rapid thumping of her heart. She wonders if Okita’s heart might sound the same as hers. She wonders, if it does, whether it’s sounded that way since Nobunaga stumbled upon her, and what it might mean if it hasn’t.

* * *

**1636**

When the weather doesn’t promise storms, Okita stays in the hills until twilight, taking advantage of all the sunlight she can get. Nobunaga doesn’t mind this. Okita doesn’t know that she has no home to return to. Okita doesn’t know that this _ is _ Nobunaga’s home, all of Kyoto is, and that her offers to accompany Okita home at night are just rare trips into the city, liveliness taken in measured breaths to remind Nobunaga of where and who she is.

Nobunaga sits on a tree stump, watching Okita practice. They spar, sometimes, but not today. Okita insists on reviewing her form, and Nobunaga is content to linger. She picks at the frost on the ground and makes shapes of the snow with her hands, but what Okita doesn’t know (what Nobunaga thinks she doesn’t know) is that she’s always watching. She loves the blur of sunlight in Okita’s hair. She loves the thrill of sidelong glances turning, just barely, into open stares that can hardly pass for impartial observation. She loves the way Okita’s hair falls loose of the ribbon holding it up with the sway of her body and the wind rattling bare branches.

When Okita is done, she sheathes her katana and wipes her sweat with the backs of her bracers. She hands Nobunaga’s coat back, and with a nod, they’re descending down the hillside. Sometimes they talk, but sometimes, there’s rare moments of perfect quiet, their footsteps crunching into freshly fallen snow. In these times, Nobunaga wonders why they walk so close together. Shoulder to shoulder, they could be breathing the same air. If the night catches them before they’re fully back to the rivers, Okita’s hand finds Nobunaga’s pocket, but just one. More would be an imposition. More would treading dangerous ground.

Usually, if they haven’t begun talking already, they’ll find some thread of conversation on the bridges approaching the city. Something about the lights on the river, or Okita’s form, or if Nobunaga will be fine walking home by herself. (She will be, she always reassures Okita. At some point, Nobunaga had stopped wondering whether Okita was asking out of courtesy.)

They part at the corner closest to Okita’s house with nothing more than a nod and a final meeting of eyes. Every time, Nobunaga asks herself what Okita might see. Her eyes are red, the color of fire and festivals. Even in the height of the summer heat, Nobunaga’s never changed her coat for anything else, but she’s seen Okita without her hakama. That’s what she thinks of when she sees Okita train; Okita twisting under her, the fabric of her kimono parted just enough for Nobunaga to see her gleaming skin, pale like the sunrise catching the tops of snow-capped hills.

Nobunaga knows she shouldn’t be thinking of Okita in such a way, but it can’t be helped. Spirit or not, she was mortal, once; she’s still human at heart. She dreams of Okita’s lips, her hands, of teeth disrupting the always-even passage of Okita’s breath. She keeps those thoughts to herself, but she can’t keep them from her eyes.

If Okita ever sees anything, if she knows, she never lets on that she does. She parts from Nobunaga with a formal bow and a smile. Nobunaga sees her kimono’s long sleeves slide forward and drape over her hands, and answers Okita with a fond smile of her own. Nobunaga doesn’t see Okita’s hands shaking beneath the fabric, the smile collapsing behind Nobunaga’s back, the full moon reflected in dark pupils drawn wide to take in Nobunaga’s departing shadow.

* * *

**1637**

The wind shifts, and neither Okita nor Nobunaga pay any notice until sleet is bearing down on them from above, pelting Nobunaga’s coat as she holds it out over both their shoulders. Okita guards her face with one arm, and Nobunaga leads her by the other. Familiar paths turn treacherous under the darkness of storm clouds and blinding curtains of ice.

Through the blizzard and the trees, Okita can’t be sure if her eyes are playing tricks on her. Nobunaga’s hand is firm in hers, warm and tangible, not like the inconsistent haze of grey shifting constantly in front of her. It’s the storm, it has to be, something like snow-blindness for blizzards.

But when they make it down to the stone paths, when there’s enough clear air to make out more than an outline, Nobunaga is still indistinct. She’s there, red cape and black uniform, but undefined. It’s as if the gods have smeared the night with another inky brushstroke, blotting Nobunaga into the storm.

Nobunaga gets pulled to a stop under a tree with broad branches. Okita’s hands clench tight around her shoulders; her eyes burn with the light of the unseen sun, and Nobunaga is certain she knows.

But what Okita says instead is, “Oda, what’s happening?”

“Ah, well-” It isn’t like Nobunaga to hesitate, but how does one begin to explain this? You don’t, Nobunaga realizes, you just have to do it. She supposes she’ll start with her name, if only so she might hear Okita speak it into the storm once before she goes. “What if I told you that Oda Nobunaga never really died?”

“So?” Okita says. Living in Kyoto, you hear all sorts of stories about the city. One of them goes like this: on the night when Honnouji burned, they never found Nobunaga’s body. Supposedly, Nobunaga escaped. Supposedly, Nobunaga will return one day to Japan, bringing fire and death. Or, that’s how the stories go. If anyone could’ve found a way to escape the grasp of death, it would be the Demon King.

“What if I told you you’re looking at her?” Nobunaga’s smile flashes beneath the flurries, her grin seemingly the only solid part of her.

Okita doesn’t move. Tellingly, she doesn’t move her hands off Nobunaga, either. “You’re Nobunaga?” she repeats, and Nobunaga’s body comes alive like she’s being remade in Honnouji all over again. The way Okita says her name is nothing like Nobunaga would’ve thought. She’d projected a little too much of her time into her imagining; Okita treats her name as any other, wavering between curiosity and doubt. It’s spoken into and swept up by the howling storm, but the echoes of it find refuge in Nobunaga’s chest. There’s no reverence, but there’s no fear, either, and Nobunaga can see Okita trying to weigh out the truth of Nobunaga’s words, as if it’s something so easily measured. “How?”

“The truth is, I died in Honnouji. It got so hot that I was burned up, down to the very bones. But you can’t burn away a soul, can you?” Nobunaga laughs, as loud and wild as the wind whipping through her hair. “But even though it couldn’t be helped, I wasn’t really happy with how I died, so I came back as a spirit of the fire that killed me.”

“And now you’re stuck like this.”

“You say that like it’s a bad thing.”

“Isn’t it?”

“No, not quite.” Nobunaga spreads her arms out wide on either side of her. The wind whips cyclones of snow and air beneath them; with her cloak flapping behind her, she could be a firebird rising up from the forest floor, she could be smoke and cinders spiraling skyward into a violent sky. “Now I get to see the results of what I’ve done. I get to live until whatever’s keeping me here is taken care of. I like it, personally.”

“And what would it take for you to move on?” Okita asks. “Don’t tell me you need someone to light Honnouji on fire again.”

“Oh, you think that might be it?” Nobunaga says. “If I ever get bored of living like this, perhaps I’ll give it a try.”

“No wonder you’ve always tagged along with me ever since that first time.” Okita laughs, a shakiness to her voice audible even with the surrounding clatter of branches and the distant groaning of deadwood. “I’m the most interesting thing to happen to you in- how long? Fifty years?”

“Something like that,” agrees Nobunaga. “But I wouldn’t say that’s the only reason.”

In life, Oda Nobunaga was hardly open with her feelings; in death, nothing’s changed. This is the most directly she’ll ever speak to Okita regarding them; anything more would be far too forward, and any less an act of cowardice. It reminds Nobunaga of a Noh play in some ways, only in those the spirit would be someone close from Okita’s past, perhaps a sibling or a lover. Nobunaga had never once considered that, if Okita might already have someone.

Okita still doesn’t let go of Nobunaga’s shoulders. She might be afraid to, Nobunaga realizes. She might think that the moment she does, Nobunaga will twist into a thousand spiraling snowflakes and vanish into the night.

The truth is, Okita had been afraid for an entirely different reason. Her life has been one of irregularity: she steals away into the woods to practice with a sword she shouldn’t touch; she has traded prospects of marriage and romance for Nobunaga’s chatty company and the crispness of the hills. The idea of a storm-wracked sky opening up to take Nobunaga from her is not entirely out of the question.

“So?” Nobunaga prompts Okita. Becoming a spirit has changed nothing. She’s still impatient; she’s still the Demon King. This is why she speaks, to remind Okita of that fact. “Now you know who I am. Does that scare you, Okita?”

Nobunaga leers up at Okita and finds no such fear in her eyes. “You could never scare me,” Okita murmurs.

“What a bold thing to say.” Nobunaga stands on her tiptoes, bringing herself up to Okita’s eye level. Okita holds her gaze steady, hardly blinking. With the swell of the storm around them, she might not even be breathing. “Is there a reason you find yourself so attached to the Demon King?”

“Do I need one?” Okita is so close. Nobunaga can make out the details of the ice crystals nesting in her bangs, their edges slowly crumbling away. A fleeting current of air tousles her bangs, and Nobunaga feels something sputter inside her, a fluttering of flame or a missed heartbeat.

Okita’s far too close. _ Yes, _ Nobunaga wants to say. You need a reason, or a love of bloody battles, or a death wish to be this close to the Demon King. You need a reason to remind you why you’re here when, as inevitable as the shifting of the tides, you’re burned by her fire.

“Do you?” Nobunaga counters. She won’t give Okita a direct answer. Her time has passed; the decisions to be made in this world should be made by the living.

“I already have one.” Okita’s fingers tighten around her shoulders. The wind gusts, and Nobunaga doesn’t know if it’s a reflection she sees, or if a bit of herself really dances behind Okita’s eyes. It might not be wrong to think that Okita’s been lonely, too. Only a certain kind of person comes up to the hills to practice bladework, woman or not.

“Will you tell me?” Nobunaga leans in, and that’s the closest she dares to come. The rest must be Okita. Nobunaga has had her time; she remembers the countless pleasures of the flesh, everything a body could crave. These memories are what she offers to Okita. She is a spirit, experience incarnate, and it would only be fitting that here, at Kyoto’s outer bounds, is where she gives it all to Okita.

If Okita so chooses.

Okita glances away. There’s little to consider. Their surroundings are all bare bark and silver-studded darkness. What she’s looking at is a reprieve from the intense red of Nobunaga’s eyes. What she can’t see is how red she is herself, high along her cheekbones and down her neck, a flush that might be born of the storm as much as anything else.

When she looks back, it’s to move in. Her numbed hands fumble clumsily in the lapels of Nobunaga’s coat. She doesn’t know what to do, Nobunaga realizes. All of Okita’s focus has been put into the sword, her escape, so much that she’d never practiced much of anything else.

A pair of trembling lips ghosts over Nobunaga’s, and that’s enough. Nobunaga closes the distance between them with a quick step, sweeping Okita up into her arms. Just briefly, she feels the chill lingering on Okita’s skin. Nobunaga herself doesn’t feel the cold, but it finds her here, the sharp sting of winter cutting through her like a blade. Then it’s gone, chased away by Honnouji’s fires and the mellow heat of Okita’s lips. Snow whirls into the gaps between their mouths and melts into sweet nothingness. Nobunaga’s hand glides along Okita’s hair. It’s softer than she imagined it to be, and damp with melted snow.

Okita, though taller, shudders under Nobunaga. Maybe it’s different for her, a human kissing a spirit. The Noh plays never mention it- only what it’s like to feel, how one moves on. As expressive as those masks are, they can never know the thrill of hot breath thrumming over reddened cheeks or the pounding coursing through her like blood rushing in her veins.

They shouldn’t stay still for much longer. Nobunaga can only do so much to ward off the cold, and the lights of the city aren’t far, already peeking like stars through the tangle of trees. But here, before they’ve crossed the bridge back to Kyoto, it seems as though anything could happen. This is a forest where a spirit can find and fall for a human, so why not something more?

Nobunaga pushes gently, and Okita finds her back resting against a tall, imposing tree. Larger than life, not like the Demon King. Not like Nobunaga, who presses herself so tightly against Okita that it feels like Okita’s own heart might tear itself from her chest with how frantically it beats against Nobunaga’s. Nobunaga closes her eyes and imagines not just breathing into Okita, but sinking into her, becoming a part of her just as she is a part of Kyoto. She cranes her head into the side of Okita’s neck, drinking in her honeyed scent, and thinks that perhaps this existence of hers might not be such a curse after all.

* * *

There are soldiers mustering outside Kyoto’s main gate, and Okita arrives at the foot of the hills in full armor. With her helmet and chestplate in place, there’s no way to distinguish Okita from the hundreds of other samurai gathering to march south to Shimabara. Nobunaga will always know it’s Okita, though. She knows Okita by the sunlight caught and woven into her hair and the hues of changing leaves tucked into her eyes.

“The shogun’s calling us to go subdue a rebellion,” Okita says to her. “Some peasants who’ve taken a liking to that strange Western religion. I’ll be back before summer.”

“Time for all your practice to pay off, huh?” Nobunaga tugs at the face guard covering Okita’s mouth, sliding it neatly beneath her chin. “You’d better hurry back, you hear me? I can forgive you if you miss New Year’s, but not if you ditch me to watch the cherry blossoms myself.”

“I’ll come home as soon as I can, okay?” Okita spreads her arms, staggering back as Nobunaga thumps against her chestplate. It’ll never cease to be amusing to them both, how the most feared warlord in all of Japan can fit so snugly into such a delicate embrace. A tilt of Nobunaga’s chin brings their lips together.

They kiss ardently, anxiously. They kiss until the sun is a swimming haze in the sky and Okita’s cheeks are red enough that not even her faceplate can hide all of it.

Nobunaga says to her, “Be careful.” She puts Okita’s faceplate back up and pulls away with the ease of a thousand partings. “I’ll be expecting you.”

“Try not to set the city on fire while I’m gone?”

“I won’t,” Nobunaga laughs. “I promise!”

She stands on the far side of the river and waves until Okita has crossed the bridge. She moves out onto the creaking wood and stares at the streets until she can no longer tell which one Okita had disappeared down.

What Okita could never know is that this parting is a first for Nobunaga, too. Her farewells have always been, _ I’ll meet you on the battlefield_; _ Don’t come back until you’ve won for me_. Her retainers were capable, and Okita equally so, but their absences didn’t leave her with an ache in her chest that not even her fire can reach.

Not until long after Okita is gone does it finally click: it’s not the Demon King who Okita had fallen for. It’s not the Demon King who longs for Okita’s return, but Oda Nobunaga.

* * *

**1638**

The hills are coated in silver, the roads paved a with perfect grey mirror of the shifting clouds above. A thousand or more men march home to Kyoto in a serpentine column stretching far beyond what Nobunaga can see from her vantage point. So many men returning home to wives and families, and one woman hidden among them.

Nobunaga drops clumsily from her perch in the treetops and runs for the bridges.

The bodies of the living line the streets. The bodies of the dead travel down between their neat rows in wooden boxes, carried by those closest to them. They might be childhood friends, or secret lovers, or simply the closest man on the field to see the encoffined die.

Atop the coffins, tied in place, are swords. There will be empty boxes; there will be none without a sword. It’s the closest to a condolence that will ever be spoken of a samurai. There is no dishonor in a death on the battlefield, but those deaths leave gaps that can be filled, and never truly mended. Nobunaga knows of this from her years of endless fighting and so many of her men cut down in battle. She wonders if it might have looked like this in the province of Kai after she was done with Nagashino. She herself wouldn’t know: her father had been cremated, and as if fate itself had written her death, she’d been burned to ashes and thrown carelessly over Kyoto by the summer winds.

Nobunaga scrambles up the support struts of a nearby building, squinting out over the marching samurai. She’ll be able to see better from here, and more easily seen. That’s what she wants- for Okita to notice her, and should someone else spot her first, Nobunaga can easily lose them in the streets she’s come to know so well. She’ll be another youkai tale murmured around drinks and flickering fires on nights like these, when the cold fingers of winter grip a man’s heart tightly enough to make him believe in the unthinkable.

A flash of red through a gap in the marchers draws Nobunaga’s eye. Her hands still grip tight around the wooden column, but her stomach feels as though it’s plummeted those ten feet down, knocked the wind out of her.

She would know the red of Okita’s scabbard anywhere. She’s seen it dance at Okita’s side through storms of petals and ice, of lightning and crisp leaves. She’s seen it catch the rising and the setting sun, gleaming alongside Okita’s smile and the whisper of the wind in her hair.

The samurai carrying Okita’s box hold it higher than the others. It’s not intentional; they might not even realize that they’re doing it. It’s simply lighter, though whether it means the box is empty, Nobunaga can’t know. What she’s sure of: that what she’d joked about in life has followed her beyond that; the fate of those who get too close to the Demon King.

Nobunaga wrests her eyes away, the world spinning around her. Don’t think of pale skin and bloodied lips. Don’t think of eyes covered by the lifeless sheen of hammered gold with no firelight dancing in it. Think of Okita as she lived, of cherry blossoms caught on her ribbon. Remember the moonlight on her lips, the perfect warmth of her mouth, the shiver of her hakama as Nobunaga’s hand slips beneath it.

Nobunaga sees the samurai break away from the formation, turning down a side path. They’re from the same district, Nobunaga realizes. That’s how they know where to go, even if they don’t know who they’re bringing that box to.

(As much as she wishes to, Nobunaga could never be the one it was meant for. Spirits are the ones who should be mourned for, not the ones mourning the dead.)

Nobunaga does not need to see where the box will go. She knows it will travel up to a house whose gates she will never enter. She will cross the bridges and ascend into the snow-capped hills, find the highest place she can and sit there, neither her proximity to the open sky nor the title of Demon King of the Sixth Heaven bringing her any closer to Okita. She will linger there long after the snow is melted and cherry blossoms sweep the valley, and will not descend until the next year’s storms blanket the hillsides with the quiet of the grave, caught up to Nobunaga at last.


	2. Spring

**1662**

It’s a balmy day in the third month when Nobunaga is shaken out from the daze of blurring seasons she’s allowed to settle over this dream she calls her life. Up on an old temple wall, twenty feet off the ground, Nobunaga’s stupor of sunbeam drunkenness is disrupted by the insistent footfalls of someone passing down the empty alley beneath where she’s laying, belly up to the sky like a cat.

“Go away,” Nobunaga grumbles, swatting a hand down at the monk she imagines will be trying to chase her off in a moment’s time. Really, they should be used to this by now. They should have created a new type of youkai after her, some spirit that lazes around in unbroken sunlight and takes it in with two sightless eyes, trying to burn the memory of lost days back into them. Something sentimental like that- yeah, Nobunaga thinks that’d make a good youkai.

“Huh?” Nobunaga hears a feminine voice say. Oh- not a monk, then. Nobunaga pushes herself up, rolls over onto a black uniform shirt pleasantly soaked with the sun, and feels all of that warmth desert her in an instant. Nobunaga shivers from something that might be cold, might be disbelief, is definitely recognition.

Someone who looks like Okita peers up at her from the alleyway. One hand rests on a katana at her side, the other twined in light flaxen hair tied back with a ribbon, her neck tilted back as she stares at Nobunaga’s perch.

“How’d you get up there?” the woman calls to her. She doesn’t sound like Okita, not entirely. Her eyes still sparkle with a youthful brightness that Nobunaga’s Okita had tempered into hard iron with time and training.

It shouldn’t be possible, it can’t be; but Nobunaga is still alive, and so who knows?

“Okita?” Nobunaga shouts back.

“How do you know my name?”

“Why shouldn’t I know your name?” Nobunaga rests her chin atop her hand, looking far more smug than she feels. Her insides are tumbling like swirls of falling snow she’s never been sure if she wants to forget or remember forever. Nobunaga hasn’t dreamed since she died; she hardly remember what it was like, but this feeling might be it. Basking in gold of the sun and Okita’s upturned eyes, Nobunaga flies as close to the truth as she dares. “I’m one of Kyoto’s spirits. It’s my job to know these things.”

“You’re a spirit? Really?” Okita shifts her stance, hand dropping off the pommel of her sword. “I guess that explains how you got up there.”

“No, not really,” laughs Nobunaga. It doesn’t surprise her that Okita takes her claim in stride. If this were a dream, Okita wouldn’t really question anything Nobunaga says. “I climbed a tree on the other side of the wall and made my way here. It’s the best place to lie in the sun around here, you know?”

“I wouldn’t really…” Okita chuckles quietly to herself. “You’re actually a spirit?”

“Yeah!” Nobunaga squirms until she’s back upright, legs dangling over the side of the wall, judging the best place to land. She drops down onto the earth at the base of the wall, tucking her head into her shoulder and rolling to a muddied stop at Okita’s feet, elbows on her knees, pebbles tangled in her hair. She grins at Okita, all teeth, and declares, “I’m Oda Nobunaga!”

“What, really?” Okita reaches down, grips Nobunaga by the wrist and hauls her to her feet. “You’re too short to be Nobunaga. And very alive. And solid.”

“What, don’t believe me?” Nobunaga dusts herself off, a few quick pats to her chest and knees. “You shouldn’t say that out loud. Maybe I go around and burn everyone who doesn’t think I’m really Nobunaga.”

“If you did do that, I think Kyoto would be on fire pretty much all the time.” Okita leans forward, the noon sun catching in her hair and her kimono’s tied-back sleeves. There’s that feeling of cold again, the closest Nobunaga can get to having her heart skip a beat. From this angle, it wouldn’t be so hard to believe that Okita really has returned. The shape of her face isn’t quite the same, but the details are, that patch of hair that refuses to lay flat and the jasmine brown of her eyes.

It’s not the same Okita, Nobunaga has to remind herself. She had never known much about her Okita’s family, but Okita had spoken of brothers and sisters, and maybe this would be one of their children. Maybe unruly hair and brilliantly colored eyes run in the family. Ah, but if this is a dream, maybe this is Okita’s way of keeping her promise to Nobunaga. This would be Okita’s return to Kyoto, her belated reunion with her beloved Demon King.

Yeah, that sounds about right. Nobunaga wrests her gaze from Okita and stares out into Kyoto’s labyrinthine grid of streets. She imagines running through them, Okita in hot pursuit, Nobunaga making up for her shorter legs with her knowledge of all the shortcuts that Okita would overshoot and have to double back for. She remembers when Okita’s hand would finally close in on the fabric of her cape and pull her in, the roaring heat of her mouth against Nobunaga’s, the sweet scent of her hair and her skin, her kimono soft under Nobunaga’s fingers.

“Ah, well-” Nobunaga has to take a moment to remember what’s been said. She levels her stare carefully at a nearby wall, being sure not to take in too much of Okita. Starting off down the road, she throws her next words carelessly over her shoulder as a means of farewell. “Maybe I should start now.”

Nobunaga’s laughter swells through her chest as she turns and heads towards the heart of Kyoto. She knows Okita’s eyes are upon her retreating back; she can feel them as much as the wind tickling her skin, bringing with it the subtle hint of freshly bloomed cherry blossoms. Nobunaga inhales slowly, taking it in. So many years, and the airs of Kyoto still smell the same, and Okita, in some form, has returned. Truly, Nobunaga thinks, there could be no more perfect dream.

* * *

“So is this where you lurk all the time when you’re not trying to be a youkai?”

They’re atop one of Kyoto’s many hills, some distance from Ginkaku-ji. The Okita Nobunaga knew had been unable to sleep at night; this Okita wanders Kyoto’s streets in the early morning, possessed by some unknowable restlessness.

For Okita, running into Nobunaga is a sure occurrence. She’ll never know it, but Nobunaga is careful to make these meetings of theirs a reality. Nobunaga knows well enough what happens when you’re trapped with your own thoughts for too long. It’s why she’ll take up watch on the rooftops near Okita’s district, waiting for her to wander by, dropping on her from above. It’s these moments that Nobunaga lives for, punctuation marks in the long story of this dream of hers, written in brushstrokes curved like Okita’s smiles of recognition.

Today, Nobunaga’s brought them up to the eastern side of Kyoto, hoping to catch the sun’s first light on the opposite hills. Okita’s got her hand in the grass, winding it tight around her fingers. She seems to need to have something to do with her hands at all times, whether they be on her sword or riffling against the earth like they are now. That’s something Nobunaga knows about this Okita- though really, she’s starting to know so much about her that Okita can no longer be separated into _ this one _ and _ the one she knew_; they’re both just Okita, and Nobunaga would be lying if she didn’t admit some of her old feelings have spilled over towards this Okita, too.

“I don’t have to _ try _ to be a youkai, do I?” Nobunaga says. “I mean, I think I make a pretty good one already.”

“Have you even done anything that a youkai would?”

“Well…” Nobunaga has to pause and mull this over a bit. “Sometimes I play with the fires in the street lanterns at night. That counts, right?”

“Are you sure it wasn’t just the wind?”

“Hey, I know that it was me, alright?”

“Yeah, sure.”

“Okita-!”

Nobunaga’s hand darts out, batting at the side of Okita’s head. She catches only a whisper of hair against the ends of her fingertips; Okita rolls to the side in the grass, laughing in harmony with the cicadas’ ambient buzzing. Nobunaga leans over and, just to make her point, smears her palm against the top of Okita’s head, ruffling her hair.

“Nobunaga!” Now Okita is swatting at Nobunaga with a huff, her lower lip jutting out. “I just tied my hair back!”

“And it won’t kill you to do it again.”

“You…” Okita sighs and props herself up on her arms. Her ribbon, now loosened, dangles lopsidedly towards Nobunaga. “Why do I even put up with you?”

In another life, Okita might have asked this exact question. It’s been too long for Nobunaga to be sure. What she knows for certain is what her response would’ve been- _ but you love me anyway, don’t you? _ And Okita would’ve laughed, would’ve shoved her playfully away before bringing her forehead in against Nobunaga’s.

Nobunaga doesn’t dare say anything like that now. It’s not because of the uncertainty of it- god knows Nobunaga has made riskier moves with far less at stake. What stops her is the fondness in Okita’s eyes, the tenuous happiness in her fleeting smiles. She, like Nobunaga, is keeping certain things unsaid. She wouldn’t be caught admitting aloud that she prefers the company of a spirit to the living, but the truth is plain to see on her face. Nobunaga won’t ask why; she doesn’t need to know, unless Okita wants her to. All she cares to know is that Okita is happy.

“Why are you a spirit, anyway?” Okita is asking. “Or what are you the spirit of? You can’t really be Kyoto, right?”

“Part of it, I guess,” Nobunaga says. “I’m not really sure myself.” If you’d asked her this half a century ago, Nobunaga’s answer would have been that she’s the fire at Honnouji. Now, Nobunaga doesn’t quite know how she’d answer that. She’s not bitter, she’s not vengeful. She’s just a life cut short, so close to reaching her full potential only for it to be ripped away by sudden betrayal.

(Nobunaga, sneaking a sidelong glance at Okita, wonders if the betrayal is hers, afflicting Okita with her curse, loving Okita when she shouldn’t.)

That’s what this is, love, even if Nobunaga will never name it directly. She was happy to talk circles around it with the past Okita; she’s content to keep it to herself. She’s already intruded on this life of Okita’s, and asking anything more would be selfishness beyond even what the Demon King is known for.

“I still don’t know if you’re really Nobunaga,” Okita says. “When they talk about Nobunaga, they mention someone terrifying. A warlord who burned tens of thousands in the name of conquest. You’re too nice to be Nobunaga.”

“Oh? Maybe I’ve mellowed out with time, what do you think about that?”

“If that’s the case, then it’s still the same question. Would you really be Nobunaga?”

“I’m Nobunaga because I say I’m Nobunaga!”

Okita laughs again, a soft chiming of her voice. It’s carried off in a chorus of chirps from waking songbirds, fluttering skyward with their wings. She says, “Okay, then I’m Nobunaga, too.”

“It doesn’t work like that, Okita!”

“Why doesn’t it, huh?” Okita flicks grass in Nobunaga’s face. It catches Nobunaga in the mouth; she sputters, paws at her face, and Okita’s still laughing.

It’s perfect, Nobunaga realizes. Okita, this moment, everything. In the corner of her eye, the opposing hills begin to flood with a muted, glowing light. The sky between them comes alive with moving shadows, birds flitting out into the dawn, trees groaning under the wind the weight of new life.

Okita’s laughter tapers. She rubs dew-dampened hands across her hakama, leaving smears of dark pink. She’s noticed Nobunaga’s stare. Her mouth hangs slightly open, her jaw slack. She looks as though Nobunaga could kiss her, and it’d be welcomed.

Nobunaga doesn’t. That’s how she’d think of her Okita; this Okita isn’t hers, not yet. Perhaps in some euphoric future, she will be. Perhaps then the memory of one Okita will leap into the other and mix until Nobunaga can’t tell them apart.

But for now, they sit with a bit of space between them, grass swaying to and fro as if waiting for one of them to move. Okita is the one who breaks the stalemate. She turns back towards the western sky, watching the embers of reflected sunlight crest the tops of the trees, a false autumn. The light creeps higher; Okita’s hand creeps towards Nobunaga’s. The sky fills with blues and purples, the sun still masked behind them, the underbelly of a sunrise so rarely seen. Overtaken by the shadow of the hill at their backs, they touch. It might be an unseen union of silhouettes in the prevailing darkness, or a physical joining of hands. When Nobunaga tries to remember this moment, she’ll never be sure what it was. What she’ll remember is the shine of Okita’s eyes breaking through the dimness, more powerful than any daybreak after the stormy winter months. It’s here that Nobunaga realizes Okita’s unknown, unspoken truth. She’s not the same, but she’s still Nobunaga’s Okita. The light of her soul, blazing bright in her eyes, is all the proof that Nobunaga needs.

* * *

Nothing short of the work of the gods could throw Nobunaga from her chosen place of rest. It says something, then, of the shaking that rips through Kyoto like a rifle volley through a front line, hurling Nobunaga out of her tree and onto the rolling ground. She tries to stand, but can’t; she’s as powerless as any mortal, clinging to rocks and stumps and waiting for the world to go still.

When it does, she’s running full-pelt for Kyoto, rushing to beat the imminent swell of the rivers, Okita’s name on her lips and dread nestled tight against the flame in her chest.

Nobunaga makes it to the bridges in time, but finding Okita is another thing entirely. The buildings she knows lay smashed across the streets. She can leap over them easily, but their wood and brick corpses don’t tell her where Okita’s house is, and the only landmarks that remain are the hills enclosing Kyoto and the lintel and posts of ancient shrines meant to withstand the wrath of the gods.

At least the tangle of streets and alleys becomes easier to navigate, if only by nature of half the buildings being razed by the earthquake. Nobunaga darts among the rubble, ignoring the fires that lick at her cape and greaves. Fire doesn’t bother her, not anymore. It only drives her, sends her leaping like sparks over the fallen structures as she runs towards Okita’s district.

The smoke she breathes chases away all aspects of the dream. This is real, from the embers in her lungs to the angry black pillars stretching towards the heavens. Nobunaga skids to a stop at a rare clear intersection, head whipping around.

A flash of pink, and a spray of silver. Nobunaga breathes out a sigh of relief. A gust of wind buffets the fire, briefly suppressing it long enough for Okita to douse them with another bucket of water. A line of bodies stretches back toward the wells and rivers, passing buckets between them as fast as Okita and several others can empty them.

It’s a foolish thought, but Nobunaga flicks her fingers at the fire anyway. _ Be still_, she tries to tell it, to no avail. It’s fire, listening to no one; it’s Nobunaga, who wouldn’t be able to follow the advice she’d tried to give even if she died.

Up in the distant trees, the songbirds go silent. Nobunaga, attuned to them as much to the snapping of eager flames before her, recognizes the warning for what it is. There’s no time to shout. She flings herself forward over the uneven stones, arms outstretched, reaching for Okita. Surely the name of Oda Nobunaga must mean something to the fire, the whims of a spirit to the city to which it’s bound. If Nobunaga can only touch her, somehow she’ll be alright.

The aftershock announces itself with a cracking of the mountainside. The street lurches up into Nobunaga’s knees. She goes down hard into the bucking stone. Rolling with the jerking earth onto her back, her death is laid out in front of her. The facade of the building Okita was tending to hovers over them both, wooden rafters and shoji paper cinders. Nobunaga may be a spirit of Kyoto, but Honnouji is still her ghost. Nobunaga’s eyes widen; she tilts her head back, trying to catch a glimpse of Okita. She would pray, but she knows that the gods she’d spent her life trying to erase would never accept such a thing from her.

All Nobunaga can do is watch the darkness descend over them both, claws of ash and charcoal twisting the pink of Okita’s kimono. She sees Okita tilt her head towards the incoming debris, and knows she has captured Okita with her death. This is not the first time Nobunaga will be burying others with the weight of her own failure.

Nobunaga howls, reaches, twisting like smoke from a dwindling flame. Her hand falls just short. Okita, her gaze locked on three stories of weakened structure coming down upon her, never sees her. The moment ends; gravity takes over. Nobunaga slams skull-first against the cobblestones, the building coming down atop her. It presses her to the earth, squeezes the air from her chest. The only movement she can manage is a twitching of her fingers, scraping blindly for any sign of life or proof of her own. Then, as the debris settles and men climb atop the rubble to try and pull those buried out, even that becomes impossible.

There’s simply the darkness that had found her in Honnouji and swept her up, the deep black of winter nights spent waiting on a lonely hilltop. There’s only the reminder of the inevitable, stretching out in a false eternity, taunting Nobunaga even as it tempts her to hope.

* * *

Time passes at a crawl in the darkness. Nobunaga’s long since stopped straining for the noises of the surface. The creaking of the smoldering ruins and the calls of the men atop it have long since stopped holding any meaning. Reality is an echo of her own breath, her heat reflected back at her by the stone in front of her face. This must be what it’s like, being dead and buried. This must be, so many years ago, what it had been like for—

“Ugh…”

The darkness stirs. It might be Nobunaga’s eyes opening, or a shifting of the wreckage closeby. Nobunaga’s pulled from her thoughts by the sound, breathy and pained and close.

“Okita?” Nobunaga strains into the solidness between them.

“Nobu?”

“Ah, hey, yeah- wait, ‘Nobu’?”

“Am I not supposed to call you by that anymore?”

Even in this limbo between earth and an uncertain sky, Okita’s voice sets Nobunaga’s heart to skipping. She wonders if maybe she’s really died, after all. Maybe she’s awoken from one dream to the next, this one to be spent unmoving, but with Okita beside her. It’s a hellish thing to be kept still like this, but Okita’s here, and that makes it bearable.

“No, it’s fine.” As a rule, Nobunaga doesn’t cry for the dead. Death is an inevitable thing; as she says, it can’t be helped. Nor does she cry for failure: if there’s time to mourn, there’s time to think of other approaches. She doesn’t know, then, the reason her eyes prickle with moisture and her throat tightens as though held by the pitch black around her. “Okita…?”

“I remember, Nobu,” Okita says. “Not everything, but enough.” From some indeterminate distance comes the scraping of gravel, as though Okita is shifting to make herself comfortable. “I guess I really was hanging out with the real Nobunaga this entire time, huh.”

Laughter bubbles loose from Nobunaga’s chest in spite of herself. “Oh, that’s the first thing you say to me after so long?” Nobunaga chortles. A hand slaps lightly against the stone, the throes of her mirth soon fading. “But— you’re really Okita?”

“Technically, I’ve always been Okita.”

“You know what I mean,” she protests. “How do you remember things? Why now?”

“I don’t know,” Okita says. “Maybe it took getting hit in the head to bring things back.”

And like that, the somber air is back between them. The shouts of their would be-rescuers sound farther off. It could be that they’re moving off along the piles of debris, or else that roaring of Nobunaga’s heart in her ears has choked back all sound except for what she wants to hear.

“Nobu, I’m sorry I couldn’t keep our promise.” There’s another sound, a sharp popping of timbers that could’ve come from right above Nobunaga’s head. Okita was close when the building had come down. They might be right next to each other, for all they know. Nobunaga wriggles her hands out where they lay, feeling for gaps in the spaces around her. Maybe there’s a chamber beside hers, maybe Okita’s in it.

“You kind of kept it,” Nobunaga says. “We got to see the flowers bloom together, didn’t we?”

“It would’ve been better if I’d remembered then.”

“That’s—” Nobunaga shakes her head, her cheek pressing into the stone. “It couldn’t be helped, Okita.”

Okita laughs, high and soft, a tumble of cherry blossoms in the breeze. Nobunaga misses the sound as soon as it hits her ears, and twice as much when it fades. She’s heard similar laughter for the past few months, but never quite the same until just now. She’s never felt the emptiness such a small thing can leave in her life until it’s practically flung in her face, its absence raw and gaping in this void that leaves little for the other senses to cling to.

“You don’t have to pretend you’re not disappointed,” Okita says. “I know I left you at a bad time.”

“But you’re here now,” Nobunaga protests. “So there’s no need to apologize, right?”

The pause that follows weighs more on Nobunaga’s soul than any pressure from the building above them. Her chest thumps painfully, the same heartbeat rolling over and over. Then, Okita’s quiet agreement: “Yeah,” said so quietly that Nobunaga nearly misses it in the rumble of the building settling over them.

“If you really want to make it up to me, there’s still some yaezakura blooming in the far hills.” _ Near where we first met_, Nobunaga doesn’t say. She’s certain Okita will piece that together for herself.

“Ah— I don’t know about that,” Okita replies. “I’m pretty sure I’ll be out of it for a while after this.”

“I’ll carry you if I have to!”

“Of course you would,” laughs Okita. Nobunaga thinks Okita might’ve repeated herself, or else a remnant of her voice got lost in the tangle of broken wood and dwindled away there within earshot. Nobunaga finishes her tactile inspection of her surroundings, finding no way through to where Okita might lay. Still, she manages to flip onto her side, pressing herself to where Okita’s voice sounds closest.

“Do you remember that one year when it rained for half a week straight and shook all the cherry blossoms off the trees?” Okita murmurs faintly, suddenly.

“When you still insisted on practicing as soon as it cleared up, because god forbid you slack on your precious form.”

“Yeah, and I twisted my ankle and you had to carry me back down.”

“Mhm.” Nobunaga tucks her hands against her chest, warming them in her coat. In the darkness, it’s almost possible to imagine that she’s not buried, but simply turned away from a starry sky. She can imagine her own warmth rebounding off the rocks is Okita’s, washing over Nobunaga in waves of alternating heat and the echo of her voice. “What about it?”

“I was just remembering,” Okita says. “Thinking about how I didn’t realize you could carry so much.”

“Ah, that’s me!” Nobunaga declares, and at that same moment Okita whispers, _ you already do_. Her words go unheard by Nobunaga through the stone and the sound. “I don’t think you’re any heavier in this life. Let me try!”

“You’ve never carried me uphill before.”

“There’s gotta be a first time for everything.”

Another prolonged silence, as if Okita is thinking this over. Her response, when it comes, sounds distorted, as if it’s being pulled on, up and away from Nobunaga. “I guess that’s true.”

“So we’re doing it, then?” Nobunaga asks her. “Going up to the hills?”

“I should—” A pause, like a yawn, like a sigh. “I should help with the rebuilding.”

“Kyoto’s been around forever. It can wait a day for you.”

“Mm… is that Kyoto saying this? Or Nobunaga?”

“What do you think?” Nobunaga grins, nearly gloating. Her question bounces off crumpled rafters, unanswered. “Okita?” she prods. “You hear me?”

The voices of the men above sound, impossibly, even further. Nobunaga presses her hands to the wood in front of her, slamming splinters into her palms. She doesn’t feel them, doesn’t feel anything beyond a familiar chill creeping up into her from the earth, crushing what little space there is around her into a compact little crypt. “Hey, Okita!” she shouts, trying to fling her shoulder into the nearest wooden block. “Okita, you better not be falling asleep on me!”

No tired whisper comes, no mumbled apology. What’s there is a tremor of the earth, no rolling, but a shifting that Nobunaga registers with her soul. A change in Kyoto that only she can feel.

When Nobunaga is uncovered, the men who find her think her dead. It’s not until she takes in fresh air with aching lungs and reddened eyes blink in the fury of torchlight that Nobunaga realizes that they, and she, were wrong.

The same set of rafters that had come down on Nobunaga also pinned Okita. The wood itself is now strewn in the street, along with several hundred more pounds of the stuff. Nobunaga approaches the little dent in the rubble on hands and knees and heaving breaths. Splinters hadn’t affected her, why should anything bigger? Nobunaga had never considered that. Never considered what Okita might be like in perfect slumber, the only indication of something wrong the way her kimono lies, pressed in against her body where the wood crushed the life out of her lungs.

Nobunaga wonders how she’d been able to speak. She’s not one to discount Okita’s strength, but she’s not one to deny the reality of things, either. She’s not so desperate as to immediately refuse the possibility that she’d never heard Okita’s voice after all. Maybe she’d dreamt it all up in the darkness. Or, maybe she’d blurred some line between the dead and the living.

Nobunaga doesn’t know, and thinks she never will. What she does know is Okita’s skin, cold beneath her hands. Dried red coating Okita’s lips that Nobunaga wishes she could take from her. Her hair, fanned out beneath her, arrayed like a late-blooming flower. But even that’s a fantasy: Nobunaga knows the many faces of death, and none of them are beautiful like this. Death is rarely gentle; it claws and it bites, and beneath the dirt and dust settled on Okita’s kimono will be black blood and perhaps the white jut of bone.

Nobunaga chooses not to linger. She chooses, as she’s always done, to move on. The world, devoid of Okita, breathes on around her. It pays no mind to Nobunaga, swaying unevenly, wandering blindly towards the base of the hills. Its inhabitants remain oblivious to the ash drifting in from the east. They’ve got their own fires to worry about, these last remnants of death chewing away at the living, unconcerned by grey petals dissolving in the air as they flutter along what rooftops remain in Kyoto.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I only realized how short this section was when I started trimming it to post it


	3. Summer

**1698**

Some families think it easier to leave Kyoto than to rebuild. Standing in the courtyard of a crumbled house, Nobunaga understands. Rebuilding requires more than resources and manpower. It requires will and drive, and for many, those lie entombed in the earth in bodies that won’t last any longer than attempts resettle in a place of bitter memories.

Okita’s family is one of those who leave.

Nobunaga doesn’t see them go, but isn’t surprised that they do. She wouldn’t want to stay either, if she were anything but bound to this place.

These days, Nobunaga wanders Kyoto aimlessly. She doesn’t go too high into the treelines, nor too close to the center of town. She keeps to the edges of town, watching cicadas rustle through the tall grass lining the riverbanks. Their buzzing drowns out the constant whirl of her thoughts, and she’s glad for it. Their droning grounds her where the voices of the dead don’t float across the surface of her mind and reality is the smoothness of stepping-stone pathways across the eastern river. She acknowledges the supreme coincidence of a second person in Okita’s family looking like her, and that’s all. There had been no conversation, nothing spoken about a hopeful future.

Still, when spring bridges into summer and the cherry blossom trees swell with pink, Nobunaga sticks to the river. Someone loitering near the shallows isn’t such an uncommon sight. Time and loss have tamed Nobunaga from a mischievous would-be youkai to someone content with the company of her reflection and the hum of human voices along the bridges.

And by night, there’s fireflies. They swarm the river in countless numbers, flecks of gold against the city’s lantern glow. Nobunaga, when she’s not chasing some to catch in cupped hands, lies among them in the tall grass, watching them alight on her gloves and reflecting off her hat’s golden rays.

This is where Nobunaga dwells: the tangle of bubbling water and whispering grass where the noise of the mortal world comes to drown. It’s here on the Kyoto side of the river, up to her arms in glittering fireflies, that she can catch fragments of the ethereality that’s long since abandoned this city, flickering and gone like the turn of silver shimmers in the water.

It’s here where, on an August evening, the dreams she’d left behind find their way back to her.

It isn’t much, and it is everything. It’s a tumbling of rocks on the riverbank and a question breathed alongside cicada songs. “Do I know you?”

Nobunaga’s heart clatters in her chest like _ ema _on the wind. She bathes in the bittersweet familiarity of that voice. It’s a little deeper than she remembers it, a little more worn by the world; a sudden strumming of long-neglected heartstrings by something in this world that shouldn’t be possible.

The fireflies around Nobunaga disperse in a rising, swirling cloud. Through them, the flickers of a past long gone, but never abandoned. This can’t be real, Nobunaga thinks, she’s imagining connections in places they’re not. Plenty of samurai carry swords with red scabbards, wear kimono dyed in the colors of the spring. So what if this woman in front of her has hair the color of cherry blossoms on the water, a small clump of it standing nearly upright? So what if it’s tied back with a strip of black cloth; this woman’s hair sweeps down around her hips, something Okita would never have stood for. Long hair just got in the way of things, she’d always said.

“Why would you think that?” Nobunaga laughs. Her eyes trace the dark outline of the woman’s body against Kyoto’s lights. She’s taller than average, her shoulders broad, wide eyes framed by a round face that tells Nobunaga that what she sees is merely a trick of her own wishful thinking. Leave it to a spirit to see the ghosts of others where they aren’t.

“I…” The woman pauses, playing with a loose bit of hair tucked under her neck. She studies Nobunaga’s face in turn. Red eyes, the crest of a clan long since eclipsed, the half-sun on Nobunaga’s hat locked in a perpetual question of whether it’s rising or setting. “You look familiar,” she says.

“Funny,” Nobunaga replies. “I don’t think I’ve ever met you.”

“Oh, you’re from here?”

“I’ve never left.”

“I’m from Edo,” the woman explains. “From the Okita family.”

“Nope,” Nobunaga says, perhaps far too quickly to sound natural. She wouldn’t remember what that’s like, anyway. “Never heard of you.”

“Then, maybe a sibling?”

And Nobunaga laughs. That’s what she has known, in every form she’s taken, how to do. She laughed as the Demon King, signing her letters with the title she’d grow to be feared by; she’d laughed as Nobunaga, in the triumphant mud at Okehazama; as Kippoushi, darting through the grass in pursuit of little floating lights, Nobukatsu five or ten paces behind her.

“No,” answers Nobunaga, “I don’t have any siblings.”

“Hm.” Another puff of fireflies departs for a quieter section of the river. Okita’s plopped herself on a rock a little ways away. She’s still scrutinizing Nobunaga’s face, as if some subtle movement of it will unveil the answers to all her questions. “You really do look familiar, though.”

“It must be the lighting.” Nobunaga waves her hand dismissively, slowing long enough for a firefly to brush briefly against her knuckles and waver off in the direction of the others. “Find me tomorrow and you’ll see.”

And Nobunaga’s done it; her carelessness has gotten the better of her again. She’s spent so long by herself that her whims and thoughts flow freely from her like the river she’s adopted as a second home. She knows, as much as she does the lay of Kyoto’s streets and its surroundings, that this reunion defies any sense of logic. This is how dreams work, not reality, and Nobunaga remembers well the last time she’d straddled that border.

“I guess I could try,” Okita says. Nobunaga’s hands curl into fists along the insides of her knees. Damn her for her candor, but Nobunaga reserves her anger for herself; she could never be angry at Okita, least of all when this is all out of her control. She’s been strung along by fate and Nobunaga’s curse. It’s by no fault of hers that Nobunaga feels that her very presence is something to shrink from, and not believe. “Where do you live?”

“If I told you that, it’d make things too easy.” Nobunaga grins, hiding her dismay with a fox-like smile. “My clan name is Oda. You’ll have to start there.”

“Oda. Right.” The name settles easily on Okita’s tongue, a place where it hasn’t rested for nearly a century. “If I do, will you tell me the rest of your name?”

“Maybe.” Nobunaga pushes off from the ground, dusting off her trousers. “I’m going home now. You’d better not try and follow me back or anything weird like that.”

“I won’t,” Okita laughs. “Promise.”

Nobunaga’s halfway up the riverbank and heading for the bridges before she realizes Okita’s watching. She can’t make her retreat away from Kyoto now; she’ll have to wait, or travel further down the river to a point where Okita will no longer be able to see her. Turning, Nobunaga veers off into the city, joining the stream of bodies traveling towards its center. She lets herself be carried along until the sounds of human life mask any hint of the mountains and river they’re settled between. She allows herself to be lost in the mingled memory of Okita’s smile and this Okita’s brazen emotions, until she’s lost in the city as well.

* * *

Evading Okita doesn’t go so well when Okita’s one of the samurai summoned to Kyoto to join its standing garrison. Nobunaga tries not to think of where Okita practices, stays off the rooftops and in the shadows, keeps away from the river. She doesn’t retreat back to the forest: that would be unfair, and she has to give Okita at least a sporting chance.

In retrospect, Nobunaga should’ve known Okita would find her quickly. Okita is anything if not determined. Two weeks after they first meet at the river, Nobunaga tells Okita her name, and gets a few blinks of confusion, nothing more. A week after that, they run into each other near the hills by Kinkaku-ji, Okita with a stick of dango in each hand and a third protruding from swollen cheeks. If Nobunaga had taken one and run, well— it couldn’t be helped. Even spirits can crave sweets, and Nobunaga has loved them for as long as her two lives combined.

The days grow short, and the wind takes on the chill of approaching winter. Okita swaps her pink kimono out for something heavier to withstand the bite of sunless days spent wandering under cloud-choked skies. She’s still patrolling, in some sense of the word; Nobunaga never bothered learning routes, if they even exist in the first place.

To put it in exact words, she’s been tailing Nobunaga. Okita’s figured out by now that Nobunaga likes to hang around the edges of the city, near the rivers, so that’s where she goes. They wander aimless paths through side streets, meandering loops criss-crossing Kyoto. Through it all, they talk, but only about trivial things: the latest petty crime near the Imperial Palace, Nobunaga observing a fish stranded on a high-sitting rock in the river. They never talk about family, and they never talk about home.

It’s not that Nobunaga doesn’t want to know. She does— she strains to keep herself from knowing too much about Okita, but she can’t tear herself away entirely. To be close to Okita is to dare to expose her to Nobunaga’s curse. She’s left to dance like the phases of the moon, coming and going but always maintaining a respectable distance from Okita, enough that a quick dip of her head is a sufficient farewell for them both.

But even that can’t last.

Winter storms have moved in to settle over Kyoto, gathering ice on low-hanging branches and frosting over the streets. It’s only fitting that Nobunaga’s fragile peace would be shattered on a day like this. She’s just made the turn towards the eastern bridges for what might be the third time when Okita’s hand darts out, grabbing hers, pulling them both to a stop.

“Nobunaga?” she asks. With the buildings around them sheltering them from the whirl of the storm them, Nobunaga has no excuse not to hear her.

“Yeah?” Another tug spins Nobunaga around. She faces down Okita with an expression that could be crafted from the rain coming down around them, too fluid and changing to be read in any one moment.

“Where are you going?”

_ You_, Nobunaga notes, not _ we_. She’s not certain if she should be pleased with herself. “Don’t you have to patrol still?” she says, flicking her fingers dismissively. “Even though really, no one should be out here.”

“You are,” Okita points out. “And that’s not what I mean. Every time we run into each other like this, you always turn around and head back in the other direction.”

“Well, duh. Unless you want to be the one who turns around for once. Seems kind of counterproductive if you ask me.”

“_Nobunaga.” _ Her name leaves Okita’s mouth an exasperated sigh. She can’t fault Okita for pushing her, lightly, so that her shoulder bumps into the building behind her. “You know what I’m saying.”

“Yeah? Do I?”

“Whenever we meet like this, it always feels like you’re just trying to leave.” Okita’s reaches up, catching strands of her hair blowing in the wind and winding them around restless fingers. “Do you not like being around me?”

Nobunaga’s hands curl into fists, teeth grinding away at the inside of her cheek. She’s never been one to shy away from what she feels, but this is different. She can’t simply say to Okita, _ No, I love being around you; I love you and I have for longer than you know, and that’s why I’m afraid to be near you_. To do so would be to admit more than one thing that Nobunaga likes to think she’s shied away from.

“Because,” Okita continues, mistaking Nobunaga’s silence for an answer. “I like having someone to talk to. The other samurai won’t really take me seriously since I’m from Edo, and—” Okita gestures with her hair-tangled hand. “You didn’t seem to mind. But if it’s really bothering you, I can just go back—”

“No,” Nobunaga says: an answer for both herself and Okita. This is, for her, a way out from something she cannot have, but can’t accept just letting go. She can’t let herself get close to Okita, but separating from her is its own impossibility. She could let this be an end and avoid the city for the next few decades, but to do that is to live in regret, something Nobunaga absolutely refuses to do (though she does, she already has, she laments her curse and Okita and the thought of giving Okita up again).

“Nobunaga?” Okita studies her face carefully. Nobunaga knows that look well; she’d worn it once. It had been her, long ago, huddling in the shadows of whatever would shield her from the wind, peering up at Okita as she waited to hear her final goodbyes.

“Sorry,” Nobunaga rasps, letting false laughter float across her lips. “I was just thinking. I’ve ah, lost a lot of friends who were samurai, see. So it’s kind of hard for me to try and get close…”

“Oh,” Okita says. “I- I understand. Then… does that mean you don’t want to be friends?”

_ Yes_, Nobunaga should say. Then again, she’d never been good at doing what was expected of her. She was always off chasing the newest imports, the latest innoventions. Now that she’s left all that behind, the only thing left to chase is the shadow cast parallel to her by a life as impossible as her own.

Friendship, she can do that. Just that, and nothing more: a compromise that even Nobunaga can accept. “I do,” she says. “Want to be friends, I mean.”

“You’re… just not sure how?”

Oh, Nobunaga is sure. She learned certainty long ago and lived for its rigidity. It’s the weight of her rifles in her hands, or Okita’s palm, or their entwined laughter crystallizing in sunbeams and refracted off the mirror surface of the rivers. She knows more than how to be Okita’s friend; she knows how to be Okita’s lover, if only that was a reality the two of them could allow.

“We’ll figure something out,” Nobunaga shrugs.

“You won’t run away from me whenever you see me?”

“Hey!” Nobunaga says, half protest and half laugh. “I don’t _ run away _!”

“Yeah, then what do you call all this?”

“I- tactical withdrawal?”

“Same thing!” smirks Okita.

“Oh, like you’d know,” says Nobunaga. “Like you’ve ever fought in a war.”

The sound of Okita’s laughter swirls into the cold rain and gets carried off by the wind. Nobunaga’s eager grin crumbles at the edges. Okita doesn’t notice; she’s looking off towards the center of the city, where higher and denser buildings offer the promise of better shelter.

“Hey.” Okita tugs on Nobunaga’s sleeve. “Let’s get out of this storm. I kind of want some tea. That’s a thing friends do, right?”

“You’re hopeless,” Nobunaga tells her. “Absolutely hopeless.”

“You’re saying that because you don’t know either.”

“I’m saying that so we can find out together!”

Again, they’re laughing. They turn away from the sluggish, ice-laden river and head back towards wider streets. Nobunaga and Okita. It’s not hands in pockets or kisses under snowy skies, but it’s what Nobunaga has. It’s a feeling lighter than memory and sweeter than the fleeting visions glimpsed under the cover of her eyelids. It brings a smile to her face, and to Okita’s, and really— in another life, that would’ve amounted to nothing; for Nobunaga, heavy with ice gathered on her shoulders and the gold tassels hanging off her uniform, it is nothing less than the world.

* * *

**1699**

The road up to Kinkaku-ji starts to empty out with sundown. By nightfall, it’s all but deserted, flowers awash with the moon’s silvery light forgotten for the lantern-studded streets around the Imperial Palace. Nobunaga doesn’t mind this, though. She prefers the quiet, to hear the rustling of the wind through the freshly blossomed flowers, and to watch them be carried off into the valley. It’s in this stillness that Nobunaga hears Okita approach, a steady tapping of sandals on stone.

Nobunaga nearly doesn’t recognize Okita at first. Okita’s drawn her hair back into a neat bun atop her head and traded the coarse kimono she wears for patrols for a softer one, intricate patterns of branches and flowers flowing up its sleeves. The giveaway is her sword, hung at her side like usual.

“Really?” Nobunaga calls to her from afar. “You brought your sword with you to a cherry blossom viewing?”

“It’s just in case!” Okita protests. Nobunaga notices something in her hand as she draws closer: a small box, lid nudged slightly open, a scraped-clean dango stick protruding from the gap. “I brought us some snacks,” she says, offering the box to Nobunaga.

“You mean you brought yourself some snacks.” Nobunaga jerks her chin at the stick, a toothy grin smudged across her face. “You already ate one.”

“I was hungry! It’s been a long day. Besides, you didn’t bring anything either.”

“Maybe I just ate it already,” Nobunaga says. “I’ve been waiting here forever.”

“You have _ not_.” Okita’s hand knocks lightly against Nobunaga’s shoulder as she sits.

“Oh, but what if I have?” And Nobunaga laughs to conceal the fact that she has, that she’s been here for so long that by sunset she was dusted more by pink than gold. Watching the people come and go has kept her mind from promises left long unfulfilled. With just herself and Okita, she’s being drawn back towards those memories. She throws her voice out into the cherry blossoms, as if it might snag on to something and hold her back: “I’m glad you could make it up here,” she says. “It’s nice. No clouds, I mean.”

Okita doesn’t respond right away. She’s got her mouth wrapped around another dango stick. Her hands fold over her knees, pulled up to her chest. Polished bracers shine in the moonlight. There’s some scuffs on the leather where she’s brushed up against walls or from training matches, but nothing to indicate that she’s seen hard combat. Nor are they new; Nobunaga’s studied every part of Okita in the time they’ve known each other, and she’s worn the same bracers this whole time. (In her dreams, it’s not Okita’s armor that Nobunaga knows best, but the crease and softness of her hands, dragging through Nobunaga’s shirt, twirling patterns in her hair.)

“I guess we’re lucky,” Okita says. She slips her bare stick into the box and reaches for another. “We picked a good day.”

Up high, the wind rustles through the branches, shaking more petals loose. A handful of them flutter onto Nobunaga’s head, even fewer onto Okita’s. Okita nudges them loose with a quick couple shakes of her head, all but one. A stubborn petal keeps clinging to where her ribbon wraps tight around her bun, captivating Nobunaga’s gaze. No matter how far back Okita leans to take in the spiral of stars and branches and cherry blossoms around her, that one petal refuses to fall.

Looking at Okita, Nobunaga realizes a paradox. Her shoulders hang low and relaxed, but her hair is pulled tight and wrapped with such care that Nobunaga knows that alone might be the reason Okita arrived so late. She spins her dango stick between her fingers, picking each dough ball off one by one, biting into the silence. In the season between the icy glint of winter and the wet sheen of summer, Okita shines with a radiance all her own. The moonlight doesn’t illuminate her so much as glow through her. Okita finishes off her dango, flips the stick along her fingers, reaches to put it away. Her eyes meet Nobunaga’s, and there’s no time to look away and pretend her thoughts have been elsewhere.

“What is it?” Okita asks her.

“Ah. Your—” Nobunaga reaches out. Her shaky fingers pluck the petal from Okita’s hair and scatter it with the others in the breeze. “You had. Something.”

“Oh.” Okita smiles. “Thanks.”

“Has anyone ever told you your hair is the same color as the cherry blossoms?” Nobunaga says suddenly. The words burst forth from her as if torn loose in the same gust of wind, too heavy for her alone to bear.

“Huh? I don’t think so.” Okita laughs and tucks her face towards her far shoulder. Her hand moves up to swipe through the temporary absence of her hair. “Does it really?”

“I think so,” Nobunaga says. She’s always thought that, but had she ever said it? To any Okita? She can’t remember. Seasons and lives blur themselves together again, their emotions vivid as their colors. What few moments remain in perfect clarity splash themselves against the streams of cherry blossoms, snow and ash and longing and Okita.

“Nobu?” Okita’s hand rests on Nobunaga’s arm at the same moment that she flinches. Nobunaga rolls her shoulders, trying to play off her reaction as just a spasming of her muscles and not a shard of ice lancing the length of her ribs into her heart. “Is something wrong?”

“Ah, just sore from sitting so long, don’t worry.” Nobunaga offers up a grin placate Okita, and to trying to distract her murmurs, “I’ve just really wanted to see the flowers bloom like this.”

“Did it rain last year?” Okita asks. “Or— well, I guess you could go flower viewing when the weather is bad, but it’s not really the same.”

“I meant with a friend.”

“Oh.” Okita’s hand slides off her jacket, and that icicle-sharp stabbing is back. Surely Nobunaga would be brave enough to ask for Okita’s touch back, but that would be going too far; bravery now would be to endure the feeling until it passes and joins the others dwelling in her mind, until some acute sensation brings them all rushing back again. Okita’s fingers skim the skin by her ear, pushing back something that isn’t there. “Um, I brought a lot of dango up here. Are you sure you don’t want any?”

“I’ll take one,” Nobunaga says. Okita scoots the box towards her, and she picks up a stick, twirling it around for inspection. Green, white, and pink— the colors of spring. Abruptly, Nobunaga shoves the whole thing in her mouth. Okita balks; Nobunaga wants to laugh, but her teeth are stuck together and she’s trying not to cough. It’s a good distraction; it’s worth Okita’s scolding. It’s enough to make the tears beading at the corners of Nobunaga’s eyes seem natural, and nothing more.

* * *

To this Okita, she becomes _ Nobu_, not Oda or Nobunaga. To Nobunaga, Kyoto becomes a place to be known and lived in, not avoided. It would be hard to think otherwise when Okita is tugging her by the sleeves or by the corners of her cape to dango stalls and tea shops. She’s convinced Okita’s solemn goal in life, if not to be a peacekeeper in the old capital, is to find the best dango in town.

She lets her guard down, perhaps for the first time in a century. Or maybe she’s always lived this way, and only recognizes this otherness because of what it is.

What Nobunaga doesn’t deny is that she’s grown complacent. She’s allowed herself to become used to this Okita, and that’s why she’s taken aback by the hand on her shoulder and the blaze of lantern light in Okita’s golden eyes. “Nobu,” she says, and the inflection is wrong, not at all like Nobunaga remembers it. She sounds simultaneously familiar and not, like the cicadas coming to life in the grass and trees surrounding Kyoto, a different generation every year and yet always the same song. “Nobu, why weren’t you honest with me?”

“What?” Nobunaga says, genuinely confused. It could be any of a million things Okita is talking about— the yukata that she’d bought in preparation for summer, the mitarashi dango near the shrine at Gion that had tasted more blackened than doughy.

Okita settles beside Nobunaga, herself perched on the edge of one of the rocks overlooking the eastern river. This is, by unspoken agreement, where Okita and Nobunaga know to meet each other: a landmark within walking distance of Okita’s favorite tea house, a place where Nobunaga can linger and watch the river or the people. “You never told me who you were,” she says. “I remember, Nobu. Not everything, but enough.”

“No,” Nobunaga says, instinctually. It’s both a protest and an answer. Okita’s anticipated this; her hand snags Nobunaga by the shoulder, holding her in place.

“What do you mean, ‘no’?”

“I’m not doing this.” Nobunaga squeezes her eyes shut, sealing out the world. She can’t bear to look at Okita right now.

“Nobu?” Nobunaga doesn’t have to be looking at Okita’s face to know what hurt must be on it. Okita’s fingers press imploringly into her arm. “What do you mean? I thought…”

“What happened the last time you remembered me?” Nobunaga asks her. “Do you remember that?”

“Yes, but it doesn’t matter,” Okita says, and it’s the wrong thing to say. Nobunaga’s teeth grind against each other, and her cape whips a wide circle as she jerks herself free of Okita’s grasp.

“You can say that!” Nobunaga snaps, leaping up from the rock. “All you have to do is remember, but have you thought about how long it’s been since I’ve seen you? All this time, I’ve been wondering if I’d just dreamt up you remembering me, if I’d just missed you so much that I imagined it all. And then to have you come and tell me you remember, and that you dying doesn’t matter—”

“I didn’t mean it like that.” Okita’s voice quivers, laden with emotion and the beginnings of tears. Nobunaga feels herself deflate— she can’t be mad at Okita for this. Her Okita, always so sensitive, as quick with her sword as she is to feel: Nobunaga turns to her and, in spite of herself, takes Okita in her arms.

“I know,” Nobunaga murmurs into her chest. “I’m sorry. It’s just— the last time you remembered, you were dying.”

Carefully, exaggerating her steps, Okita tugs Nobunaga away from the rock. That does it: the dam bursts. Nobunaga giggles helplessly against Okita’s kimono, grabbing handfuls of it, unable to let go. Okita leans down, burying her face in Nobunaga’s hair. Nobunaga doesn’t have to look up to know that Okita’s eyes are closed: their feelings are one and the same. She soaks up Okita with deep breaths and feels the patter of Okita’s tears against her scalp. Her glove fumbles clumsily along Okita’s cheek— she’s still taller than before, and no amount of memory will change that— until the warm seep of Okita’s tears stains her fingertips.

“Nobu,” Okita whispers, the sound a relic of a hundred bygone years. “Nobu, I’ve missed you.”

“Me, too,” Nobunaga replies, her voice low and equally choked. She doesn’t cry: Nobunaga does not cry, but she clings to Okita all the same. “More than you know.”

“I mean.” Okita takes in a sharp gulp of air. Nobunaga hears it stutter over a lump in her throat, and its counterpart in her own chest swells with a violent suddenness. “I’ve always felt like there was something missing. In the past, too, in my other lives, it was always this same feeling.”

“It’s not too late to change your mind,” Nobunaga sucks in a breath of her own. Sweet incense and hints of smoke, that’s what this Okita smells like. Nobunaga wouldn’t give this up, not for anything, but it’s because she loves Okita that she has to offer her that chance. “I’m pretty sure we both know I’m cursed by now.”

“And what?” Okita challenges her. “That means I shouldn’t love you? Because I do, and that won’t change.”

“If you do, you’ll die.”

“I’m human. I’m going to die anyway.” The back of Okita’s hand grazes the side of Nobunaga’s face. Her fingers find her chin and push beneath it, lifting Nobunaga’s head. “I made you a promise.”

“And you kept it.”

“I half-kept it. Next year, we’re doing it for real. Memories and everything.”

“And twenty sticks of dango?”

“Thirty, and you have to help.”

“Deal,” Nobunaga says breathlessly. Okita could ask her for anything right now, and she’d find a way to give it to her. It’s the least she can do; it’s all she can do. She meets Okita’s eyes: little flecks of starlight dance nestled in Okita’s eyelashes. Nobunaga stands on her tiptoes, places one hand on the rock and the other on Okita’s shoulder, and leans up. A thin layer of saltwater covers her lips. Nobunaga licks it clean and finds Okita staring at her, watching. Waiting for something, proof or some allowance that things could go back to the way they were before.

Nobunaga’s hands delve into the tangle of Okita’s hair. Her lips collide with Okita’s with all the force they can muster. Their kiss is not chaste; it’s hungry, it’s desperate. It’s Nobunaga breathing her soul and her grief into Okita. Okita’s hands find her hips and pull them both down into the grass. From Okita’s lips comes the forcefulness of life. The movement of her mouth on Nobunaga’s says, _ I promised, I’m back._ Her hands on Nobunaga’s back spell out an _ I love you_. They kiss until their lungs burn and they need to breathe, or perhaps they don’t. Maybe they drown there in the sea of each other, an ethereal lightness in their bones, to crashing waves of cicada song.

* * *

Okita picked out this yukata before she remembered Nobunaga, but it fits her all the same. The cherry blossom pink of her hair fits nicely against the navy blue of a midnight sky. Thankfully, she’s left her sword behind for once: red and blue working in tandem is still a hard sell, and a sword would only slow her down in the reeds growing along the river.

Okita is used to moving with sureness and deliberation. Slowness is a new thing to her, and stillness something else entirely. For the thirtieth time, she glances over her shoulder at Nobunaga. Nobunaga answers with a measured blink, no nod. For her to move would send up a swarm of fireflies, happily resting everywhere from folds of clothing to the gilded bands on her hat.

“It’s not fair!” Okita hisses to her. Her hands inch forward to cup around a firefly: it takes off before Okita’s even begun to cover it, and quickly vanishes over the river. “How are you doing that?”

“I don’t know,” Nobunaga answers. Some fireflies buzz drunkenly away from her chest, rattled by the vibration of her voice. “Maybe it’s ‘cause they think I’m part of Kyoto or something.”

“How can they tell?” Okita scans the grass for her next target, turns, starts creeping through it. The rustling of the reeds and a wisp of pink hair standing upright mark her passage along the riverbank. “You look nothing like a building or a plant.”

“Don’t ask me,” scoffs Nobunaga. “I’m not a firefly.”

“It’s ‘cause you’re so short,” Okita giggles. “They must think you’re part of the grass.”

“You take that back!”

Okita breathes her laughter out into the warm air and disappears again. The grass whispers with the swish of her yukata. Another firefly darts away from her, escaping towards Nobunaga. It flits an indecisive circle over her head before heading for the other side of the river, where a legion of its kind flash between the trees. Okita surfaces briefly to watch it go; her eyes meet the red of Nobunaga’s, incandescent in the light of the fireflies gathered along the seams of her coat.

“Hey,” Nobunaga says impulsively. “Come here.”

“Huh?”

“Just trust me. Come here.”

The grass twists around Okita’s ankles as she climbs back up to Nobunaga. Her approach sends fireflies scattering in every which direction, darting away from Nobunaga’s upraised arms. “Here.” Nobunaga pats her thighs, easing herself back until she’s flush against one of the boulders dotting the riverbank.

“What are you doing?”

“You’ll see! Come on.”

Okita settles herself atop Nobunaga with a bemused smile. Nobunaga’s arms drape over her shoulders, fingers linking tight behind her neck. “Okay,” Okita says. “Now what?”

“Were you always this talkative?” Nobunaga leans as far back as the rock will allow, taking Okita in. Her neat ponytail has unraveled partway, loose strands of hair framing her face. Pieces of dried stalk cling to her yukata. Today’s a rare day she hasn’t been assigned to patrol; she’s allowed to be messy, imperfect. Reminiscent, even, of the Okita that Nobunaga had first met in the wintry hills, now a recognized protector of her city, and still so fiercely loved.

“Maybe I picked it up from you.”

“Is that so?” Nobunaga grins and tugs Okita into her. They collide awkwardly, fumble for position. Okita’s thighs end up courting the hem of Nobunaga’s coat, and her hands disappear into Nobunaga’s cape. “Just stay still. Relax. Give them a moment,” Nobunaga says.

“Who—” Okita begins. Nobunaga’s mouth covers hers, drowning out the rest. For once her kiss is slow, but not measured and no less demanding. Nobunaga’s palms cradle the back of Okita’s head and twirl circles into her hair. The warmth of her skin is a welcome relief from the humid summer heat. Nobunaga’s fingers come away with a sheen of sweat; she shifts, and lightly wipes her hand off on the grass.

The first firefly lands on Nobunaga’s hat. They seem to like that part of Nobunaga the most— perhaps because of the reflections in the fanning metal. Okita starts clumsily, pushing against Nobunaga’s hand. Nobunaga holds her sturdy, an uncommon patience in her touch. Her eyes dart to Okita’s arms, resting questioningly by Nobunaga’s hips, and to the firefly that’s just touched down on her skin with nothing more than a light prickling of feet so tiny as to be intangible.

The fireflies return as quickly as they dispersed. They settle wherever there’s solid space to be found, on Nobunaga’s coat, on the wide sleeves of Okita’s yukata. Nestled one close against the other, they are the stars in a night sky muddied by lanterns. Okita closes her eyes, and Nobunaga follows suit, the better to feel the miniscule movements of Okita’s lips over hers.

Cut off from the world, Nobunaga tries to imagine a new one in the space under her eyelids. A sea of blinking gold around her. Summer, wet against her temples. The roar of the river as it carves its way past Kyoto and out to sea. Okita pressed against her, all soft skin and daring touches. A symphony of shifting constellations and the relief of their reunion, no less acute no matter the passage of time. Funny, Nobunaga thinks, it’s not even July yet, but that’s alright. In the world of her mind, it is always and never July, and there’s no need for a wish. Not when everything Nobunaga could want from the world rests in her arms, breathing softly against her neck, stars and fireflies alike dancing in tandem around them.

* * *

Rain and rushing water have torn Kyoto apart before, but never like this. Never surging from their beds and creeping into the city with fingers blackened by mud carried down from the hills. Nobunaga’s seen plenty of floods in her time. Her familiarity has made her complacent; she realizes this now, but still could never have gotten herself to leave the city with Okita still in it.

“You know,” Nobunaga shouts over the hiss of the rain and the splashing of their shoes in the rising water, “there’s a point when doing your job crosses over into wholesale stupidity!”

“But we got everyone evacuated, so it’s fine!” For the hundredth time, Okita adjusts her hold on Nobunaga’s wrist. It’s hard to keep a firm grip on the slick fabric of her coat, and made even more difficult by the constant warping of Nobunaga’s form. She shouldn’t be out in this rain, a thick and heavy curtain draping from the darkened sky to the shin-deep water surging through the streets. But, when the alternative is to stay in the city when this storm shows no signs of abating, there’s nothing to do but to retreat to higher ground with the rest of the city’s residents.

The closest bridges to them are the ones leading east, out towards Gion. Stone walls and teahouse streets, an ideal place to wait out the storm. Nobunaga lets Okita pull her along, tries not to think too hard of the numbness in her legs and the suction of mud clinging to her boots. She tries not to choke on the moisture thick in the air and her overlapping frantic breaths, taking in less air and more rainwater streaming down her face.

Okita’s steps falter. Her thumb goes slack on Nobunaga’s wrist. Her skin reflects the ashen grey of the sky and the swollen eastern river, eating at the land far past its shores. Hungry tongues of angry water lash across the bridges, too dangerous for a human to cross, impossible for a spirit like Nobunaga.

“Downstream!” The shout rises easily to Nobunaga’s lips. “Come on!”

But as Nobunaga soon learns, it’s not the sight of the river that stopped Okita dead. It was the weight of a realization Nobunaga’s instinctually numbed herself to, and chosen to forget. It comes back in painful clarity with a simple murmur of Okita’s, searing its way through her being like lightning across the heavens.

“I think this might be it, Nobu.” Neither Okita’s voice nor her stride falter. She doesn’t look back, though her fingers slide through the gaps between Nobunaga’s and press into the back of her glove. Made wet and cold from the rain, Okita’s warmth through the fabric is red-iron hot, unmistakable, unbearable.

“No,” Nobunaga says. “Don’t talk like that. If everything’s washed out here, we’ll just go to the western side.”

“You said it yourself,” Okita tells her. “The last time I remembered, I was dying. We’ve been lucky, Nobu. We’ve had all this time together.”

“I told you, don’t say things like that!”

“It’s okay.” They pass another bridge, this one long gone, torn from ancient foundations by the pulse of currents. What remains are two posts on either riverbank, themselves a foot out in the river, barely peeking over the white crests of breaking water. “We’ll see each other again, won’t we?”

“What if you stay in Edo? What if you never come to Kyoto?”

“That won’t happen. I made a promise to come home to you, and I’ll keep it. I’ll find you, no matter how long it takes me. That’s part of that promise.”

The river dips in towards the city. Okita steers them around the rising water, rain spilling in a pink waterfall over Okita’s shoulders. Her hair sticks to her back, hardly swaying with the wind or her determined steps. Between the sheets of pouring silver, it looks totally still: a reminder of a distant time when the sky was blackened by smoke rather than storm.

A man’s life is but fifty years, she’s always said. With her, Okita is lucky to reach thirty. Far be it from Nobunaga to complain about fairness, but for someone such as Okita, a death like hers comes too early. She should be living out her prime walking the streets of Kyoto, not running along its edges with Nobunaga behind her and death on either side.

“Nobu,” Okita says. She adjusts her grip, wringing out the gaps between her and Nobunaga’s fingers. “I’m going to die sometime. It’s just how life works. But I’ll get to see you again, so I don’t mind.” Another bridge goes past, also overwhelmed by the river, ruined cedar fingers stretched helplessly upwards. “But you have to promise me something too, okay?”

“Like what?”

Now Okita looks back. Her smile makes Nobunaga’s head spin— it resonates in her eyes as much as on her lips, enough gentle warmth to counter a lifetime’s cold, if only it would stay for longer than the brief moment of their eyes meeting. “You can’t blame yourself for any of this,” she says. “Not now, not ever. I’ve chosen this as much as you. Even if we are cursed, I’d still do all of this to see you again.”

They can’t kiss, not with the river still rising and the outline of Nobunaga’s form vanishing with the rush of mud and silt. The crossing to Gion is far behind them, but another looms ahead: a bridge so new that Nobunaga hasn’t yet committed it to memory. With renewed determination, they surge along with the waters, feet gliding along the submerged cobblestones in time with the river’s writhing. A few more meters. A dash to safety and a scramble up the hill, and then they can lose themselves amidst the snarls of roots and rocks, and laugh about how stupid they’ve been.

Okita wades out onto the bridge, ascending with its slope until the water only reaches her ankles. Nobunaga runs out with her, legs shimmering in the ink-black river. Under the cover of clouds and murk, neither of them see where the bridge gives way, wooden panels torn loose by the current to be dashed against the rocky bottom.

There’s no time to react before the waters close over Nobunaga’s head. Only the rail, held in place by stronger wood, keeps her from being carried off. Nobunaga clings to it with vanishing arms, fighting more to hold on than to surface, both impossible tasks. The river is part of Kyoto, too; the river keeps Nobunaga for its own. Debris in the water stings her eyes, wearing them away. Nobunaga can only hope that Okita has seen her go under, has turned back and not been devoured by the water.

Something knocks haphazardly into Nobunaga’s back, just behind one of her shoulderblades. A tug, and she’s surfacing: her lungs have no water to cough up, but she gasps anyways, sputtering like a candle in a burst of wind. She’s drifting, still. She may have been lifted from the water, but it keeps tugging at her essence, imploring her to stay. Her mind is too heavy to refuse, her body too sluggish to resist. All Nobunaga does is float upon this wayward current, one that bubbles with the sound of her name in weary whispers.

In this storm, it’s impossible to distinguish river from rain. It seems a solid entity, unbroken, beating down in icy bullets on Nobunaga’s face. She’s being lifted up towards it; the river is swelling; the river holds tight around her waist and pushes her up onto a tangle of rocks clumped high enough to remain out of the water’s reach.

The river looks up at Nobunaga with golden eyes and drenched sleeves slipping loose from the rocks. Nobunaga stares back, not knowing what it is she sees. The world is a blur of dark and pink, smoke and flesh. She knows enough to try and extend a hand into the water, but her limbs are limp, and her arms are soaked where they protrude from under the scant protection provided by the trees lining the shore.

A flash of blinding white ignites the sky. Nobunaga shields herself against it, an instinctive fluttering of her eyes. What might be a remnant of lightning lingering beneath her eyelids slips into the river. It glimmers again, a second time, and is gone, down a dip in the river.

Stretched out beneath the heavenly void, Nobunaga closes her eyes, and waits to be borne away as well.

The rain doesn’t stop for another day. It takes several more for the waters to recede enough for what bridges remain to be safely crossed, waterlogged planks squishing muddy sludge that dries quickly beneath the repentant sun.

Nobunaga, heated back into tangibility, lingers on the far riverbank.

This far south of Gion, there isn’t much further until the edge of Kyoto, or what Nobunaga remembers it to be. The city hasn’t expanded much beyond it, nor does Nobunaga wonder if she’d even recognize it if it had. She doesn’t need to know that when her answer is the feeling of mud weighing down her boots and the river clawing away at her heart. What she does know is that what she’d seen in the water was not the lightning’s ghost. It was flowing pink and starless midnight, still as the grave, watching Nobunaga until she was gone from sight. What parts of the river Nobunaga can reach hold no secrets meant for her, and what’s to be found at some distant bend is meant for Edo.


	4. Autumn

**1729**

Nobunaga has never been one for mornings. She rose early only when it was time to march, and for nothing less. Mornings are chill bites and breaths smeared in the air, uncomfortable heat gathered in fingertips and noses. Nobunaga used to prefer the cold of nighttime, more mellow in its approach, mulled in hooded lantern lights.

Sunset no longer satisfies Nobunaga. The vanishing of light is marked in reds and purples and scars of dark clouds cresting distant mountaintops. Sunsets are daily dreams of fire and disappearance, and someday she’ll love them again, but not now. Soon, but always in another month, another year. She fills that time by waking early to catch pink skies, tendrils of twilight streaking over Kyoto.

Then come the days and seasons blurred together: swirls of color chased up and down the slopes near Kinkaku-ji, fireflies chased through the hills and never again through waist-high reeds. Storms and winter are weathered beneath thick-leaved canopies. Their aftermaths are worried away with tea and dango. The soy sauce variant, always that— three-colored dango is asking too much of Nobunaga.

She abandons chasing echoes on the wind, but can never seem to leave behind the allure of spring. Longer days and ripened leaves, the billowing of life before the heat of summer. These nights are the most benign: they offer nothing but blossoms on the breeze. Nobunaga, finds herself more often by the temples, laden with sticks of dango filling the gaps of her fingers. Should she stop for a flash of pink, it’s rarely substantial: a gust of wind, the sleeve of a kimono.

One time, it isn’t. It’s confusion and impossible golden eyes framed by sunrise hair, the faint parting of lips that speaks wordlessly of inarticulate recognition.

Nobunaga extends her hand: charred dough and soy sauce glimmering beneath the full moon. “Hey,” she says. “You want some dango?”

* * *

**1730**

This Okita is not a morning person. She does her patrols with more than one patch of hair sticking up, and settles for the evening with the rest barely tamed in a ponytail. She keeps it short, as Nobunaga remembers her prior lives had done. Her scabbard is no longer red, but white, the etched wave pattern on the blade clearer than Nobunaga remembers.

So many differences, and Nobunaga learns them all, and well. She memorizes the blaze of the sunset in Okita’s hair, the unconscious furrow of her brow as she devours the dango Nobunaga brings her (and asks, inevitably, for part of Nobunaga’s share). That’s how she knows, one Spring later, that the air in Kyoto has shifted. Okita still waits for Nobunaga by the western bridges, but her stance has changed, and she wears her katana as though it were a lighter blade.

Nobunaga’s boots come down hard against the cobblestones. The sprint she breaks out into comes to her as easy and naturally as breathing. She runs full-pelt for Okita, and feels herself surrounded at once. A warm hand in her hair, another across her back, soft rolled-up sleeves against her cheek. “Didn’t I tell you?” The cadence of her words feels strange with this younger voice, but that’s such a trivial thing. Okita’s fingers tap at her cheek; when Nobunaga refuses to emerge from the nook of Okita’s arm, she feels a brief but firm press of lips to the top of her head. “I said I’d come back.”

“I know,” Nobunaga murmurs into her shoulder. She has never doubted that Okita would return, but the question of when and its uncertain answer have worn their scars into her soul, now as immutable as the shifted boulders on the riverbank.

“Oh, Nobu.” Okita’s fingers work the length of Nobunaga’s spine, down and up again. Her touch is, in its own way, an apology for things they’ve silently agreed never to speak of. Nobunaga shivers like leaves on the wind, held steady only by Okita’s touch.

“Okita.” Nobunaga whispers the name into Okita’s kimono, meant for solely herself. She feels that she must speak it to the world, a declaration that they’ve found each other again, and refuse to be parted. It’s impossible for Okita to have heard her, but Okita’s fingers tousle her hair, and she hears the rumble of laughter against her jaw. Even if Okita hadn’t heard her, she knows Nobunaga well.

“Today’s one of my off days,” Okita tells her. “Do you want to get some food and talk?”

Nobunaga peers up at Okita, shining red eyes emerging from the safe shadows where they’ve hidden. “By food, you mean dango, right?”

“You can’t complain,” says Okita. “You don’t even need to eat.”

“Have you ever considered there might be more to life than just dango, Okita?”

“Who’s the one who started a conversation with me by offering me dango?” Without breaking contact, Okita’s hand slips tight around Nobunaga’s wrist. The whisper of her gloves sends Nobunaga’s heart thumping wildly against her ribs and her mind reeling for something to say. “I’ll buy, but you have to fill me in on everything I can’t remember. Deal?”

“Yeah,” Nobunaga says. She leans in close to Okita, pressing their arms together, not yet daring to lay her cheek on Okita’s shoulder. That can wait until they’ve situated themselves on a hillside, and then Nobunaga can stare to her heart’s content, taking in the autumn flush of Okita’s cheeks and her meticulous way of eating dango that, even before she’d remembered, was still essentially the same. She’ll bask in Okita’s smile, in the brightened sunshine and the birdsong riding in beside the cherry blossoms. But first, she’ll lead them to the nearest dango stall, these two worlds she knows so well now as tightly as entwined as Okita’s arm around hers.

* * *

With summer comes rain and a restlessness to Nobunaga that Okita understands well. She shifts her weight across the stump that she and Nobunaga are sharing, protected by broad-leafed branches crossing overhead, and wraps her arms tight around Nobunaga’s body. From the other side of the valley echoes the sound of the passing storm: thunderclaps to drown out the constant hiss of the downpour.

When it storms like this, the only place in Kyoto where Nobunaga can feel at rest is beside Okita. Even then, there’s as much tension in her as there is moisture and static in the air. Sometimes she wonders if Okita knows, if that’s why Okita comes to find her whenever it’s raining hard enough to lift the rivers to the edges of their beds and threaten to strangle Kyoto between them.

And then, rarely, the rains will come suddenly and unannounced. This is one such time; it’s caught them in the hills above Kinkaku-ji, where they go to spar in private. There’s no danger in rains like these, just as soon arrived and gone, clouds emptying their darkened underbellies into the valley. They could just as easily return to Kyoto and find a place to wait. Okita doesn’t suggest it; Nobunaga doesn’t think of it. She leans against Okita’s shoulder, thinks only of fingers tight around her shoulder and winding through her hair.

From this high in the hills, Kyoto is all wood-shingle roofs and empty streets. The storm is a pause in Kyoto’s breathing, in its livedness. Under the dark cover of the clouds, the unlit and shapeless city could be the one Nobunaga had lived in, or where Okita had first loved her. Rain like this lifts Kyoto from its roots and bears it along, swirling in aimless currents of time.

“I think it should stop before sundown,” Okita speaks into the cooling air. “Maybe sooner, if we’re lucky.”

Nobunaga just nods, presses her cheek to Okita’s collarbone. She doesn’t doubt Okita, but the clouds are known liars, and the rain a thief. Nobunaga cants her head to bring her ear to Okita’s chest. The rolling thunder above is lost to the steady thrum of Okita’s heartbeat, more calming than any warmth or cup of tea would’ve been.

“You know,” Nobunaga ventures bravely. “This rain’s gonna be shit for your katana. You’d better clean it when you get home.”

“You always tell me this,” laughs Okita. “Are you speaking from personal experience?”

“I commanded armies once, you know! It’s the job of a leader to know what’s best for my men.”

“But I’m not one of your soldiers.” Okita loops her fingers in the air, Nobunaga’s hair coiling around them. Sentiment brings them up to Okita’s lips. Nobunaga feels herself flush, new heat in her cheeks stinging as much from the cold as her openness.

“I’m your elder,” Nobunaga protests. “I’m a spirit. Aren’t those good enough reasons to listen to me?”

“Maybe,” Okita says. A tilt of her hand lets Nobunaga’s hair go free. Her palm ghosts over Nobunaga’s cheek, angling her gaze back towards Okita. “And I will, I promise. I’ll be careful.”

“What’s that gotta do with your katana?”

Okita doesn’t respond aloud. She touches her lips to Nobunaga’s, light and quick; that’s her answer. They’ve known each other long enough for Okita to recognize Nobunaga’s unspoken worries. So much more than affection is bundled up into that kiss. It’s understanding, it’s reassurance. It’s Okita telling Nobunaga that the rain is simply rain.

* * *

The yukata Okita picks out goes well with her hair. Paper lantern lights jump across the white fabric, catching the cherry blossom pattern, flickering fire bringing it to life. Okita’s hand sits warm in hers, the two of them navigating the crowds packing the shopping district. This isn’t Nobunaga’s preferred place to celebrate Tanabata, but it’s Okita’s, so Nobunaga endures the noisy throngs for Okita’s smile and the promise of dango.

“Here!” Okita sticks her hand through a gap between the bodies. She pulls it back, twin strips of blank paper dangling by twisted strings from her clenched fist. “They should have something to write with at the shrine.”

“Or I could make some charcoal,” Nobunaga offers. “So we don’t have to stand in this massive line.”

“Nobu…”

“Okay, fine! But I don’t know what I’d write down, anyway.” Nobunaga puffs out her cheeks, throwing a careless glance at the clear skies above. “I don’t think there’s anything I wanna ask for.”

“Better fashion taste?”

“The _ one _ day I’m not in my coat-!” Nobunaga’s palm thumps lightly against Okita’s shoulder. For once, she’s shed her coat for something more fitting: a black yukata embroidered in gold, a pattern of birds taking flight creeping up along its length. A change of appearance is as simple as a few minutes of concentration, but even that can’t save Nobunaga from a Sengoku-era idea of aesthetic. “Okay, if you’re so sure of yourself, you tell me what you’re wishing for!”

“I can’t,” laughs Okita. “It’s a secret.”

“You know I can just read what you write as soon as you tie it up.”

“Then I’ll tie it somewhere you can’t reach.”

Okita grins, wide and mischievous. A sudden furor of emotion seizes Nobunaga by the heart. This same feeling has crept up on her before, but its arrival never ceases to be a surprise. These are the moments she lives for. Centuries and curses mean nothing in the face of Okita’s unmitigated happiness.

“By the way, Nobu,” Okita says. “Speaking of charcoal. Did any of my past selves ever tell you about their dreams?”

“No?” Nobunaga answers. She twists the string of her paper tight around one finger until it pales, then unravels it and begins again. “Why?”

“Oh. It’s just, I’ve been meaning to ask you for a while, but it always slips my mind. Back before I met you or remembered you, I used to dream of fire sometimes.” Okita’s eyes wander their way to Nobunaga’s face, staring with a fondness that Nobunaga could never tire of. “I thought maybe it had something to do with that, but I still keep getting those dreams.”

“See, you really did miss me that much!” Nobunaga flings an arm around Okita’s shoulder, sleeve nearly flopping out and hitting her in the face. “Ah, when you make your promises, you really do commit to them.”

“Do you really think so?” Okita sighs. “It’s because I was born into a samurai family, isn’t it?”

“Don’t change your mind about that now,” Nobunaga says. “Unless you want to become an ironworker. Then you can make me some guns and we can conquer all of Japan together!”

“So that’s what you’re going to wish for.”

“I never said that, Okita!”

“I’m just joking.” Okita reaches the front of the line and seizes the brush, making a few quick marks on her paper. She’s off before Nobunaga can try and peer over her shoulder. True to her word, she finds a high branch to hang her paper on, standing on the tips of her toes and biting her lip with concentration.

Nobunaga laughs and shakes her head— that’s Okita, alright, the rash side of her that only Nobunaga gets to see. Carefully, she takes up the brush, cradling it between fingers more used to swordsmanship than calligraphy. She still remembers how it’s done, though— a few sharp swipes of the brush, hardly any different than dictating the course of battle with a sword. Her wish is spelled out in flowing kanji, but before Nobunaga’s had time to admire it properly, it’s being plucked from her hands and delivered to another branch, tied in place with a sturdy knot.

“Hey!” protests Nobunaga. “I wasn’t done yet. And did you look at it?”

“I didn’t,” Okita says. “Promise.”

“But why’d you take it?”

“You don’t think someone would find it weird that Oda Nobunaga is making a wish on Tanabata?”

“I’m sure plenty of people sign their wishes with names that aren’t theirs.” Nobunaga’s cheeks inflate again as Okita takes her by the wrist, leading her away from the shrine. “And besides, what should it matter what name I signed it by? It’s not like I wished for black powder or anything like that.”

“But you won’t tell me what you did write down?”

“Nope!” Nobunaga chirps Okita’s words back at her: “It’s a secret.”

“I had that coming,” Okita sighs. “Alright, if that’s how you want to be.”

“I’m sure you could guess it if you tried hard enough. I still wouldn’t tell you if you got it right, though.”

“I guess that’s fair— no, wait.” Okita’s grin becomes a smirk, almost Nobunaga-like with how whimsically her mouth twitches to form it. “It can’t be helped.”

“Now you’re stealing the thing that I say!”

“Come and take it back from me!”

Okita lets go of Nobunaga’s hand and darts through the crowd, a wisp of silver beneath the canopy of the night sky. Nobunaga runs after her, shouts and laughter mingling and flowing from her lips, short legs straining to keep pace with Okita’s lengthened stride. Forgotten are the words written on slips of paper to be burned in the coming dawn, twin wishes fluttering side by side in the last remnants of the summer wind, where the ghosts of cherry blossom petals and fading summer heat dance themselves into nothingness.

* * *

No one but Nobunaga sees the lightning. Its aftermath is arrayed in swathes of orange sweeping through the city. Tightly-packed wooden roofs spread fire at a speed that impresses even Nobunaga. By the time the first alarms sound, temple bells pealing over the valley from every corner, there’s a clear line of flame streaking from one river to another, and eating towards the hills.

The height of autumn and its storms does nothing to stop the fire’s advance. That morning, there is no sunrise, dark rainclouds choked by jet-black plumes of smoke gathering beneath them. Wet ash clumps like paste, sticking to everything— wood, cobblestones, people. By noon, the rain tapers to a bearable drizzle, and Nobunaga flings herself from her sanctuary in the hills to brave entry into the city. Her boots fly over water-slicked planks without a second thought. Nobunaga’s solitary thoughts have dwelled on vagrant storms too long for her to sit by idly.

Making it into Kyoto is easy; finding Okita isn’t. The touch of flame renders landmarks unrecognizable, cobblestone made indistinguishable from burned ruins. Nobunaga runs heedlessly through it all, leaping over charred debris. Fire clings to her tighter than her cape, catching the ends of her hair, alive in her eyes. The sky might be scarred with rain, but this is the closest to Kyoto she’s ever felt. The ache of Nobunaga’s knees as she runs blocks out rising memories of years long since forgotten, rolling earth instead of thunder. Nobunaga refuses to let those memories find a hold, not on her or this reality.

The pulse of the city leads her along burning veins to the Imperial Palace, a rare break in the fire’s advance. A line of samurai stretches from its gates to the river, swords abandoned for buckets, straining to shout over the roar of the approaching inferno. Nobunaga finds Okita down near the far end with a small group of others, axes in hand, hacking away at a nearby structure. Nobunaga understands this; they’d done it in her time, too, but never for fires on such a scale as these.

Fleetingly, almost comically, Nobunaga’s thoughts turn to Honnouji. She’d joked with Okita about that once, hadn’t she? Something about burning it to free her spirit— if such a thing could be imagined. Caught up in the thought, Nobunaga doesn’t catch the blur of movement in her periphery at first. When she does, she’s sprinting forward, agonizingly slow. Okita’s name streams forth from her in a desperate howl. The shifting wind catches her voice and dashes it to inaudible shreds. Even from where she stands, Nobunaga catches the snapping of timbers, yielding readily to the storm-fed sway of the air.

Nobunaga’s never wondered how she must’ve looked like, being buried under a mass of destabilized wood and stone, but now she knows. Okita catches a burning beam square in the chest and tumbles into the smoke with the rest of them. Nobunaga is there but a moment later, arms plunged up to her shoulders in the rubble. A broken rafter, charcoal, nothing. Nobunaga carelessly tosses her finds aside. She’s looking for signs of life. She’s looking for gentle pink in a world painted in only the harshest of reds.

Embers in the wood flare and die at Nobunaga’s touch. Another gust of wind; renewed shouting; Nobunaga drowns it all out. The rest of Kyoto is lost to her. Its single most important thing lies beneath this smoldering pile. Nobunaga claws after Okita, the flames on her hands sputtering in the rain. A little deeper, a little further. Okita can’t have been out of her sight for longer than a few minutes. There’s time, there has to be—

At last, something soft. Nobunaga drags her hands around, feeling out its shape. Warm skin, the faint flutterings of movement. Okita.

“It’s okay.” Nobunaga doesn’t know who she’s speaking to. It could be herself or Okita or the city itself. One last effort sends a massive section of wood sparking into the street. She reaches for Okita with arms wreathed in smoke. Some of the wood buried deeper had caught; sections of Okita’s kimono are burned away, patches of raw and ruined skin scoured by the pouring rain.

Okita shudders as Nobunaga lifts her, twisting from side to side, eyes clenched tight. Her gasping breaths whisper weakly to the rainfall. Standing, Nobunaga now understands the shouts; the Imperial Palace burns from roof to gate, tongues of flame making headway against the drenched tiles. Nobunaga moves past it, arms locked tight around Okita as she pulls away from the advancing flame, heading for the only conceivable place that might still be safe in this city.

Nobunaga runs for the river and finds it flooded. Rather than water, its opposite banks are laden with people. Nobunaga settles with Okita’s head in her lap in the shadow of a bridge, hovering over her with ungloved hands. For all her familiarity with fire, she knows nothing of treating burns. All she can do is sit and stroke Okita’s hair, white wisps rising from her cape and coat to join the mist settling thick over the river, and wait.

It isn’t long before Okita comes to. Nobunaga focuses on her face, all bright skin and dull eyes. She sees Okita’s lips move, but hears nothing: her voice is lost to the rush of the river and the crackling fires.

“Yeah?” Nobunaga says. Her fingertips trace Okita’s bangs with the utmost care. “What is it, Okita?” Again, a fluttering of Okita’s mouth. This time, nothing emerges. “You’re gonna be fine.” Maybe that wasn’t what Okita was going to ask her, but Nobunaga feels as if she has to say it. She’s a part of Kyoto; she’s a fire spirit, maybe at a time like this, saying something like that will ingrain it in reality.

Okita shakes her head. Her body shudders in Nobunaga’s arms, a heaving series of coughs that spit out equal parts blackened blood and clotted ash. A lift of her hand brings trembling fingers to Nobunaga’s cheek. Trails of soot mark her hand’s descent. With it goes Nobunaga’s gaze, taking in for the first time the totality of Okita’s burns. Her clothes hide a gathering of them on her arms and legs, but the worst ones go totally unseen. The only proof of their existence is the light shudder of Okita’s body with each of her rattling breaths.

“Okita?” A prickle of heat takes root under Nobunaga’s eyes and is dismissed, just as quickly, by the splash of rain against her face. The dirt on her face collects in the water and drips down her chin, a trickle of grey quickly lost in the mud. Again, Okita doesn’t answer beyond a slight shifting of her body to press her cheek to Nobunaga’s coat. Nobunaga hunches over her instinctively, using herself and the bridge to try and block out the rain. Still, a few droplets find their way to Okita’s skin, beads of warmth that quickly dwindle into nothing.

Nobunaga reaches down for Okita; it seems Okita had the same thought. The unburned skin of her palm pushes against Nobunaga’s. Nobunaga hardly dares to entwine their fingers— it’s Okita who does that, who rests their joined hands across her chest. Here, the tremors of her body are more obvious than ever, the movement of each breath like a thousand fluttering wings.

The streets above them fill to the brim with fire, uncontrolled and wild. In an era now long forgotten, that had been Nobunaga. Now she huddles with Okita’s body cradled against hers, foreheads pressed together, thoughts of island sieges that ended in flames bringing the salt of the sea to her lips. Okita, her movements ever so minutely slower, rocks herself against Nobunaga. Their exchange is silent: anything that could be said is told in squeezes of their hands, shallow shakes of Nobunaga’s head. And, somewhere in there, the brush of hot air over Nobunaga’s ear, accompanied by something that might’ve been, _ Promise_.

The sky lightens, and shudders, and darkens again. The inferno screams and passes, flowing opposite the river towards the hills, lashing Kyoto with insatiable tongues of fire. What’s left behind are embers, smoking weakly into the rain, and Nobunaga, clutching Okita against her.

“Nobu?” Okita’s lips form the whispered ghost of her name. Her fingers twitch in Nobunaga’s, the first sign of vitality from her in so many hours. Nobunaga dips her head lower, and hears Okita’s next word wash over her: “Sing?”

“Huh?” Nobunaga breathes, her voice thick with yearning and fear. “You want me to— the Atsumori?”

“Mhm.” Okita smiles, tugs at Nobunaga’s coat. Her cheek comes to rest on its inner lining, kept dry by the position of Nobunaga’s body and her hair draped over it.

“Ah, sure.” It takes Nobunaga a moment to remember how her favorite song begins. She’d used to sing it all the time: before marching off to war, or even when she was bored. It was a song for an era of change and mortality, now only sung on moonlit nights with Okita falling asleep against her shoulder and Nobunaga’s hand in her hair.

A man’s life is but fifty years, and Nobunaga has had so much longer. She’s passed into the realm of dreams she used to sing about so frequently. Between the slow rumble of the verse, she feels Okita nuzzle into her: a subtle shaking of her head, a long and quiet sigh. Nobunaga closes her eyes and tilts her head back, delivering the last words of the verse to the sky. It’s taken up by the wind and mixed with the smoke drifting from Kyoto, thickening the heavy mist already settled over the river. Above it, the embers of the burning city form stars on the pitch-black canvas of the clouds, ever-shifting constellations that welcome Okita’s soul among them and leave Nobunaga with only her smile.


	5. From Season to Season

**17xx**

Nobunaga doesn’t dream of burning temples or soil muddied by blood anymore. Those memories belong to a distant past, one of shifting borders inked in red. Of course, that doesn’t mean Nobunaga is free of her dreams; the only thing that’s changed is the shade of red, closer to pink, and the echo of Okita’s struggling breaths cutting through the darkness.

It’s no surprise that Okita finds her way back to Kyoto. She’s of samurai blood, after all, and her honor is only as good as her word. Nobunaga knows it’s Okita: still the same white-wrapped katana, black bow holding back her hair, cherry blossom pink fluttering with the spring wind.

She’d said she would come back, but Nobunaga had never promised to be there to meet her.

Nobunaga knows well enough to retreat before what can’t be helped. Kyoto’s advance pushes over the river and up the walls of the valley. Nobunaga shies from it, but never further than Kinkaku-ji. At heart, she’s still a part of Kyoto, and to cut that out of herself would be to destroy her very being.

From the Golden Pavilion, she sees the cherry blossoms bloom and scatter, the rains come and turn to ice and go, bringing the next year’s new life with the thaw. Okita cuts a vivid streak through the city, keeping order and bringing in those who would disrupt it. It’s beauty given form, and like beauty, just as fleeting— Nobunaga glimpses Okita with long auburn hair flowing at her side one summer, and Kyoto becomes unbearable to know.

It’s selfish of Nobunaga to expect Okita not to fall in love with anyone else; Nobunaga knows this. She’s selfish to the core, her conceit propped up by the long list of her accomplishments and the very existence of a unified Japan. This pride won’t let her commit to anything by halves. She lives for herself and loves uncontrollably; she loves Okita, and drives herself into the thickest parts of the western forest for it. Better this, than to subject Okita to knowing her and the whims of fate that follow.

She loses Okita, as she intended, to the maze of rooftops and the autumn fog that lays itself thick over the city. Okita is somewhere below her; she knows this, up until the day that she doesn’t. Only then does Nobunaga wonder what might happen if Okita forgets her, if she’s made a future reunion between them impossible.

But there had always been a chance that Okita wouldn’t have come back to find Nobunaga again. They’d never considered it, because it had been an equally impossible thought. Okita always kept her word, and Nobunaga endured on.

It would be a simple matter to change that. Okita might have already forgotten for good. It would be as easy as Nobunaga walking into the river and letting it take her. Nobunaga could never see herself doing it, though. Honnouji had been one thing, an honorable demise. Nobunaga could never let the river carry her off the way it had Okita.

What’s left is to linger in the hills, waiting for Kyoto to relinquish its hold on her. Should she ever have the chance to meet Okita again, Nobunaga will never tell her about these days. What doubts the Demon King may have are for herself to know, and not the living. Okita doesn’t need to know what Nobunaga dreams of: blackened skin and tender flesh, surrounded by her arms and fire. Nobunaga’s a spirit of fire, after all. In that moment, she’d forgotten. She’ll never be certain of which burns Okita already had when Nobunaga pulled her from the flames. She was too focused on running, on the river. The only thing she’s sure of is the increasing familiarity of this dream, of Okita slipping slowly away, enduring in her mind alongside the ghosts of everyone Nobunaga has burned.

* * *

**1863**

Nobunaga’s fingers are matchsticks, a snap of them her flint. A lantern floats down the river, following after the two that Nobunaga’s already set adrift. A fourth sits nestled in her palm, waiting for Nobunaga to give it light. A gentle roll of her wrist sets the wick aflame. Nobunaga lowers the lantern down carefully, not minding the prickling of cold along her fingers. The discomfort is momentary. The candlelight from the lanterns lasts far longer. Nobunaga doesn’t take her eyes off them, not until her four blur against the water and join the larger mass of flickering gold departing towards the south, no longer distinguishable.

Nobunaga rises from the riverbank, dusting off her trousers. This ends her one yearly incursion into the city. There’s still a hint of orange in the sky, the last whispers of daylight. Come nightfall, the shrines will fill with dancers and music, and Nobunaga will be far from it all. For now, there’s still a little time. Maybe it’s not too late for her to pick up some dango on her way back into the hills.

“You there, wait!”

From one of the nearby bridges comes the thump of sandals. Nobunaga’s chest tightens before she’s even raised her head. She scrapes her teeth together, thinks momentarily of fleeing. She wouldn’t get far. She’s always been shorter than Okita; Okita would catch her eventually, and Nobunaga is not one to run so easily.

The grass on the riverbank muffles the harsh clatter of approaching footsteps. This is Okita; Nobunaga doesn’t doubt it. Her eyes are narrowed in that same curious way of Okita’s, and a patch of hair stands taller than the rest. She wears a pink kimono, not a smudge of grey in sight, and one hand rests on the sword tied to the sash along her waist. It’s all Nobunaga can do to take her in, to remember to keep breathing.

Okita says, “You know me, don’t you?”

“I know a lot of people,” Nobunaga replies cryptically. _ All but one of them dead_, she thinks, but doesn’t say. The edges of her mouth quirk upwards: “You’ll have to be clearer than that.”

“I’m Okita. Okita Souji. And you’re Nobu.”

In spite of her best efforts, Nobunaga forgets to breathe. Her heart skips a beat and races to make up for its loss. She can’t tell if her skin is flush or pale; she feels all at once disconnected from the world and hurled back into it. Okita has never remembered her from their first meeting; Nobunaga doesn’t understand how or why she would.

“Okay, maybe I am.” If this is truly _ her _ Okita, she’d be able to hear the shiver in Nobunaga’s voice. She’d know it from stormy days spent in the forests and huddled in tea rooms. “That still doesn’t mean I should know you.”

Okita’s expression twists with confusion. This Okita isn’t one that remembers, then. Maybe she’s the same as Nobunaga, haunted by dreams of lives half-dissolved in time, dredged up by a restless mind.

“I—” Okita presses the heel of her hand to her forehead. “This is going to sound so stupid…”

“I’m sure I’ve heard worse,” Nobunaga tells her. She has, of that she’s certain. What that might be is also lost to time; the only thing she can remember of her once beloved brother is the way he’d smiled, even at the end, boyish and tired. “Try me.”

“Okay. There’s… one of my ancestors wrote a scroll a hundred years ago. It said that if I came to Kyoto, that someone named Nobu would be waiting for me. I thought it was just some weird superstition, but you look…” Okita glances up and down Nobunaga, her gaze lingering on her cape and sunbeam hat. “You’re just like she described you.”

“Yeah? And what else did that scroll say?”

“Just that I might get dreams of fire. I did, rarely, but I’m not sure if that's what she meant.” Okita’s voice takes on a softer note, and she adds, “But the scroll also mentioned something else. It said that I’d feel like something was missing, that I’d know it when I met you. When I saw you across the river, when I realized it was you, it felt like…” Okita trails off, mouth moving soundlessly, eyebrows just barely touching together. “It was like everything got a little clearer. And if you were real, then maybe everything else in that scroll was, too.”

“What else did it say about me?” Nobunaga asks. “Hopefully to bring me an offering of konpeito?”

“Nothing like that.” Okita’s shoulders lift, a hesitant giggle escaping her. “Just that my family knew you when they used to live in Kyoto, and that you’re some kind of spirit tied to the city.”

“Pretty in-depth, huh?” Nobunaga steps forward, leans in, light from the nearby buildings throwing her shadow out to eclipse Okita’s. “I’m impressed. Yeah, I’m Nobu. But did that scroll of yours tell you who I really am?” Okita blinks down at her, head cocked in a sort of puzzled way that makes Nobunaga’s chest swell. It’s just as much laughter as relief— this Okita doesn’t know everything; it’s possible for her to still walk away from Nobunaga, if only she could convince Okita to do it. “Didn’t think so. Tell me, does ‘Oda Nobunaga’ ring any bells?”

Okita’s reaction is immediate. Her hand is at the hilt of her sword before Nobunaga’s laughter has faded from the air. But it’s only an instinctive move; Okita’s fingers unravel from around the grip, shifting her weight off her back leg and studying Nobunaga closely.

“You’re Nobunaga?” Okita says, more amused than afraid. “You’re really Nobunaga? But you’re so…”

“Say short. I dare you.”

“I mean— all the history texts say you were this terrifying Demon King.”

“I can be plenty terrifying.” Any other time, to any other person, and those words would have been delivered with a flourish of arms and rippling laughter. The only way Nobunaga can say those words now is in a low tone; anything more would cause her voice to crack. “Do you know what happened to whoever wrote that scroll?” Okita shakes her head, and Nobunaga’s grin widens so far that it hurts; it’s garish and empty, but it’s too early for this Okita to know that. “She got burned up by my fire. Still think finding me was a good thing, Okita?”

Okita’s answer is a question itself: “Would you do that to me?” she says, holding Nobunaga’s gaze. She’s let go of her sword, but her hand still hovers near its grip, ready to draw it at a moment’s provocation.

The answer should be yes. A lie, to spare Okita the curse of those who are close to the Demon King. But she couldn’t; she could never hurt Okita willingly. Nobunaga would rather let the rocks in the river bear her down to its bottom before she would lay a hand on Okita.

Her second’s hesitation is enough. “Then I don’t have anything to worry about,” Okita says. “Do I?”

“You know you don’t have to listen to an old scroll,” scoffs Nobunaga. Even to her own ears, her derision sounds weak. How could she ever hope to mean those words when she herself is a relic from an era forgotten by peace? “Especially one as old as that. For all you know, I’ve changed since that thing was written.”

“I don’t think you’d change like that, Nobu.” Okita’s pensive tone strikes something deep in Nobunaga’s chest. Water wells up in her eyes, sudden and burning, unable to be blinked away. This isn’t her Okita, not yet, but those words had sounded so much like her, down to the way they’d fallen off her tongue. “Even if you did, that doesn’t mean you can’t change again.” Okita runs her fingers over her hair, sucking in the breeze through her teeth. “Besides, something just feels right when I’m around you. Don’t you feel the same way?”

The truth is that Nobunaga understands exactly what Okita is feeling. She, too, has felt her deepest being shift, feelings long neglected rekindling at the slightest sound of Okita’s voice. “Maybe,” Nobunaga replies. It’s the only answer she’ll give Okita. That’s what she, in her grief, had forgotten— the choices to be made in this world should be made by the ones who have to live in it.

“Well, I have to go meet a friend,” Okita says, gesturing towards the city. “But I’ll come and find you again, alright?”

“If you insist.” Nobunaga doesn’t agree, doesn’t protest. Okita scrambles up the riverbank, casts one final glance back at Nobunaga. Her silhouette shines against the backdrop of the city; hair gleaming in tones of gold and orange, hakama swishing like falling autumn leaves. Around the corner, and she’s gone— Nobunaga’s legs go out from under her, the last of their feeling having seeped away, dumping her back on the grass.

So that was what Okita had been up to, asking so much about their past. A peal of careless laughter rings out over the river, snapped up by the open sky. Of course Okita would find some way to fulfill her promise, one way or another. Nobunaga lets herself lay back in the grass, feeling it tickle her neck and between her fingers. Okita is here, has found her; the terror of the last time Nobunaga had held her and the ache from the last time she’d seen her feel distant, maybe even forgettable. Nobunaga immerses herself in the dual canopies of the sky and the river, a dark expanse filled with the twisting gold of stars and fireflies, lanterns and embers. Perhaps it’s a spark from one of them that ignites a flicker of hope in the long neglected hollow of her chest; it would have to come from that, or else from the thought of Okita.

* * *

**1864**

Perhaps if Nobunaga paid more attention to the shiftings of Kyoto, she’d have realized why it is that Okita came. Okita is honorable to a fault, but even she wouldn’t have come to a distant city just because a dusty old scroll had told her to. She looks good in blue— a shade a little darker than the sky, patterned with white triangles at its sleeves. Okita wears it far better than any of the men she’s been given command over, Nobunaga thinks. The sight of Okita running through Kyoto, wind pulling cloth and hair alike back over her shoulders, drags up memories of Kinkaku-ji and past springs.

Nobunaga keeps herself to the trees and the rooftops, Okita’s second and distant shadow. Sometimes, she thinks Okita might know, or else some part of her past has found its way to her and guided her eyes up to the walls encircling the city’s many shrines. Nobunaga is careful not to let herself be seen— she knows well enough what duty means to any Okita; she won’t make Okita choose.

Okita seeks her out anyway: at night, when the others in the Shinsengumi take their watch over the streets. Those hours find Nobunaga near the feet of the western hills, chasing fireflies in circles to cup between her palms and fling haphazardly in the rough direction of Okita’s face. The thing is— she wishes it was Okita she was taking up between her hands, and not some nostalgic semblance of warmth. She wishes that she could be selfish and take Okita all for herself, but this is no longer Nobunaga’s world to leave her mark upon, and the dead must give way for the living.

Unfailingly, Okita finds Nobunaga almost every night. It isn’t as if Nobunaga’s made a game of it; there’s only so many places she could be, even in a place the size of Kyoto. It shouldn’t surprise her any more than the coming and going of the sun, but it does: the city warms for Okita’s smile, and the spirit of the Demon King goes complacent for those few hours.

On rarer nights, one spent in solitude, Nobunaga wanders. She lets the hum of the city carry her along. Kyoto’s never been stagnant, but these days it’s filled with as much tension as change. That must be why Okita came. It’s why Nobunaga, for the first time in so many years, surrenders the certainty of the hills. Kyoto makes itself known to her again, familiar streets made strange by new buildings and ancient temples recognized only by the scars left by previous fires. So little of the Kyoto that Nobunaga knew remains, more of it fragmenting away by the day. It’s a darkening of the city’s spirit, a feeling of unease slight enough to be ignored while it continues to build, unacknowledged.

The scale tips on a muggy day in June. Its arrival is announced by little more than an increase in Okita’s night patrols and a thickness in the air that might be growing humidity or friction. It doesn’t announce itself so much as scream it through all of Nobunaga’s senses, a bolt of unrestrained feeling that could only be categorized as danger. Without stopping to consider a _ how _ or _ why_, Nobunaga turns and lets the wind take up herself and her urgency, racing to an uncertain destination.

Traveling along the rooftops, Nobunaga sees the source of the disturbance long before she reaches it. Harsh reflections of the moon gleam off flashing, swinging swords. Tangles of samurai fight in the streets, a good number of them wearing vibrant Shinsengumi blue. No flash of pink reveals itself among them. Chest aching for air, Nobunaga hurtles across the gaps between the buildings, greaves pounding out the maddened beat of long-silenced war drums. Even in this near-unrecognizable place, the ghosts of old fears still linger. Okita is here somewhere; Nobunaga has to find her.

(If it isn’t too late for Nobunaga to act, as had been the case so often when she’d lived.)

Ahead, a window, the light of the moon blazing furious silhouettes onto fragile screens. Nobunaga doesn’t think to hesitate, just jumps. The rice paper tears easily under her elbows. Nobunaga hits the tatami shoulder-first, rolling into a crouch. A hint of smoke wafts towards the newly opened rift in the room, through which streams the only light Nobunaga has to see by.

At the edges of the silver circle, a man lays in a pool of blood: throat slit, long dead. Opposite him— Nobunaga’s world blurs, the rapid blinking of her eyes doing nothing to bring it back into focus— Okita lays prone on the straw mats, face-down, a hint of blood at the edge of her mouth. Her eyes, closed, leave no way for Nobunaga to search for the recognition she knows will spell the end.

Beyond them, in the shadows, more bodies stir. No white-edged sleeves catch the glow of the moon. A quick glance around confirms Nobunaga’s suspicions. No more than five, none of them wearing the haori.

For the first time in over a hundred years, the Demon King’s katana drinks in the taste of open air. Oda Nobunaga disappears. In her place is the demon behind the destruction of Mount Hiei, the immolation of Nagashima. Fire flows from her eyes and her sword. Her anger leaps to cross paths with the spatters of blood staining the air. Some of it might be hers, an inconsequential thought. Nothing but water can kill her, and there’s only fire in this room. The door shudders as it slides; footsteps tumble down the stairs. Nobunaga cares not for their escape. Three more lay dead at her feet, and Okita is still motionless— had she always been this pale, or is it just the moon; let it be nothing more than the moon.

Nobunaga doesn’t even bother to shake her katana clean. She jams it back in its scabbard and strips off her gloves, grasping frantically at Okita’s neck for a pulse. Her skin is still warm— there’s hope. She’s breathing. The blood at the corners of her mouth is tacky and dark, but dry, and her haori is clean. It’s alright, Nobunaga tells herself. Okita’s alright.

Sounds of fighting continue to rise from below. Nobunaga blocks them all out. Her world is in her arms, unmoving, seemingly asleep. Nobunaga pulls them both to the window, putting her back to the wall. The flats of her fingers scrape Okita’s face clean; the backs of them slide slowly along her cheek. Nobunaga is not one to admit fear, but this is the closest she’ll come. Her touch is her plea, for Okita to come back from wherever she may be, to tell Nobunaga that her wrath is unfounded and there’s nothing to avenge.

Okita doesn’t start into awakeness so much as wash up on its shores. She struggles to keep her eyes open, to concentrate on the outline of Nobunaga’s body illuminated in the moonlight. Words are even slower to come, but they do: first a low gasp, and then a whisper that burns Nobunaga in a way her own flames can’t, a painful aching in her chest. “Nobu?” Okita says, so fondly that Nobunaga doesn’t even have to look at Okita’s face to know.

“Don’t tell me you’re going to die,” Nobunaga mutters. Her arms wrap tighter around Okita’s shoulders. It’s her, paradoxically, that draws comfort from this closeness. She buries her head into Okita’s chest, feels her steady heartbeat. So many dreams of hers have known this sound, so many reassurances. Whatever Okita might say next, this is how Nobunaga will bear it.

“I’m okay,” Okita says. “I think.”

“You’d better be,” Nobunaga says; Nobunaga pleads. So much of what she’s known is lost already.

“Nobu.” Okita’s head rolls to the side. Her cheek presses against the rough fabric of Nobunaga’s coat. “I’ll be fine. I just overdid it, that’s all.”

“You’d better,” repeats Nobunaga. It’s all she has the strength to think to say. Okita is no liar, and Nobunaga knows her well enough to know if she was, but she still can’t bring herself to believe it. It’s never this simple when it comes to Okita remembering.

“It’ll be okay,” Okita says. Nobunaga nods her agreement, the only thing she can do. To speak otherwise would be to tempt fate more than Nobunaga already does.She pulls Okita up against her body and waits for the shouts and the clashing of metal to fade. Anything that needs to be said is done through Okita nuzzling into Nobunaga’s arms, the careful warmth of Nobunaga’s fingers along her neck. The night stretches on, as long and leisurely as the moonbeams, ignoring the place where Nobunaga and Okita sit waiting, in name only, for the Shinsengumi to come up the stairs and collect their absent Captain.

* * *

**1865**

Only Okita could look her death in the face and laugh about it. _ I guess the gods are giving us longer this time, _ is what she’d said. Okita, curled up against Nobunaga’s body like the shape of the moon in the sky. She’d laughed about it then, when _ blood _ meant nothing more than little flecks of red the size of grains of sand. They’ve grown now to the size of snowflakes, but Okita still wipes smiles across her face in the wake of her coughing. Okita, so used to death, finds its approach no more threatening than the passing of the seasons.

With the falling of the leaves comes a chilling of the air. It stays long after it should’ve gone, fighting to keep its silvery hold on Kyoto’s rooftops. The cold keeps Okita’s patrols short, and her evenings spent inside. Though Nobunaga can’t follow, she doesn’t mind. For her, it’s enough to know that Okita is safe in the warm indoors with the company of her comrades-in-arms.

So when Okita appears in the hills one night, ice weighing down the hem of her haori, she knows instantly that something must be wrong. Nobunaga doesn’t hesitate to sprint down from the high treeline, tearing at the clasp of her cape to yank it from her shoulders and drape it over Okita’s. Okita hardly registers this, or anything beyond the knocking of Nobunaga’s knees against hers. Her eyes, once alive with the colors of changing autumn, are just as lifeless as the snow-laden branches that Nobunaga leads her beneath. The only hint of their former vigor is a ring of red clinging to their edges, newly fresh and raw.

“Hey, Okita.” Nobunaga pulls Okita away from the streets, up into the hills, but not too far. It wouldn’t do to bring Okita away from the city. Nobunaga still expresses more familiarity with the trees and paths worn between them by her greaves, but the opposite would be true for Okita, and it’s Okita who needs the comfort of familiarity right now. Something had to have sent her to Nobunaga in spite of the lingering frost. “What’s going on?”

Okita tugs on Nobunaga’s arm. Nobunaga complies, reaching out for Okita’s waist to pull her onto the stump she’s found for a seat. There’s something to be said for how easily Okita fits between Nobunaga’s smaller arms: familiarity, or else desperation. Okita’s legs, half-folded beneath her, drag streaks of dark earth out from under the snow.

“Yamanami left,” Okita says. The words burst forth from her uncontrolled, fraying. Her face is hidden in Nobunaga’s coat before Nobunaga can even think to offer its refuge.

“The one from your dojo?” Nobunaga asks. “The one you’re always talking about?”

Okita nods, her hands wound so tight in Nobunaga’s mantle that her knuckles look tipped with frost. “He ran yesterday,” she whispers, forcing the explanation out into open air. “He fought with Hijikata and Kondo and deserted. I went after him and brought him back.”

“Don’t you guys have that rule…” Nobunaga, expecting a nod or some sound of affirmation, is met with total stillness. The only sign of life between them is the warmth slowly seeping along the breast of Nobunaga’s coat. Without the whirl of ice in the air, it’s easier to spot the stains on Okita’s bracers, too large to have come from herself. Living had taught Nobunaga well the shades of blood on Japanese maple. “Oh, Okita,” she says. “I’m sorry.”

Okita shakes from side to side, expected to refuse, unable to. An honor thing. But damn honor and its needless call for death; Nobunaga had thought this once and still does, even as her mentor’s death by seppuku had forced her to feign her adherence to it. Damn honor; without it, Nobunaga might not have made it as far as she did, but perhaps there might be far less dead missed needlessly by the living.

Gingerly, Nobunaga straightens her back, pressing a hand and a kiss to the top of Okita’s head. She knows what’s expected of Okita— that this will be just another death, unmourned, quickly forgotten. This, more than anything else in this city other than Okita, Nobunaga understands.

Okita cranes her neck over Nobunaga’s shoulder. A sweep of the wind tickles her cheeks with strands of black hair, shielding her tears from the cold. They deserve to fall uninterrupted; it’s the least Nobunaga can offer. “Were things like this back in your time?” Okita murmurs, a plea for someone to acknowledge a loss that shouldn’t even exist.

Nobunaga presses her eyelids shut, a closing hardly distinguishable from a blink. Her brother’s face swims before her eyes, wrought with a terrified expression, no amount of acceptance able to outweigh his fear of the inevitable. “Yeah,” Nobunaga says, and presses her cheek to the side of Okita’s head. “They were.” They were worse, a whole nation of brothers killing brothers, but now is not the time for Nobunaga to disparage this group that’s unable to move itself out of the past, not when it’s all Okita has by means of family.

“Nobu?” Okita says. “I don’t want to go back tonight.”

“You can’t just stay out all night,” protests Nobunaga. “You’ll get sick or something. You’ll make your condition worse.”

“It’s just for one night.” Okita angles her chin to the side, trying to meet Nobunaga’s gaze. “Please?”

Nobunaga should deny her; she knows this. To do that would be to send Okita back to a place she can’t cry, and a room brimming with memories of her own blood. “Alright,” she relents. A sweep of her arm settles her cape over Okita’s shoulders, tucking it neatly under her chin. “But the second you cough, I’m hauling you back down there no matter what you do, got it?”

“Thank you, Nobu.” Okita, eyes already heavy from crying, doesn’t require much more to be lured into sleep. Nestled between the warmth of Nobunaga’s body and her cape, she’s gone in mere minutes. The occasional white cloud puffs out from her lips, barely given form before it’s carried off by the wind. Nobunaga hopes her dreams are the same— equally shapeless, or if not, just as quickly gone. A memory of brothers, fleetingly there and lost to the winds, as Nobunaga has always known them to be.

* * *

“What are you doing here?” Okita asks her. Nobunaga holds up a hand, or tries to. Her fingers scramble for purchase on the wood they’ve just left.

“Hold on.” Nobunaga’s head bobs precariously along the windowsill, as if she’s floating in water. “I got this. One second.”

“Do you need help?”

“I’m fine!” Nobunaga manages to elbow her way up, the front of her body now protruding through the gap in the wood. She’s not tall enough to block the flailing of her legs behind her, attempting to find the momentum to propel her forward into the room. “Just— no, stay right there!”

“You’re going to be _ seen_, Nobu.”

“I’ve got this! I— woah!” Nobunaga’s center of mass finally passes the lip of the windowsill. Her kicking carries her over in a tumbling cascade of limbs. She lands flat on her back right next to Okita’s futon, peering sheepishly up at her from beneath the tangle of her cape. “Hey, Okita.”

“Why are you here?” Okita plucks at Nobunaga’s bangs, lifting them away from her eyes. “You hardly ever come this far into town.”

“Well, you haven’t really been coming out of town, have you?” Nobunaga scrambles to sit up, practically brimming with energy. She tugs on Okita’s wrist as if to pull her towards the window. “Come on, I wanna show you something.”

“I know the cherry blossoms are blooming, Nobu. I can see them from here.” Okita tries to wrest her hand away with a poorly concealed sigh. “If I really wanted to see them, I could just go to the window.”

“You could,” Nobunaga says. “But when’s the last time you went outside?”

“Why does that matter?”

“Because every time you’ve been to see me, you look more like a ghost!” Nobunaga tugs at Okita’s sleeve, tries not to mind the brown spots that dot the lining of her kimono. “I hardly see you go out for patrols anymore! I know what you had to do to your friend hurts, but you can’t let that be the reason you stay inside—”

“Don’t talk to me about Yamanami!”

“If I don’t, who else will?” Nobunaga doesn’t need to shout to make herself heard over Okita. Her voice is hardly a rasp, no louder than the sound of a sharpening stone being drawn over steel. Nobunaga could never hate Okita, but she hates the idle state Okita’s found herself in, if only for Nobunaga’s own familiarity with it. She had been paralyzed once by the death of her mentor, and never again after that.

“I’m not supposed to miss him,” Okita mumbles. Her head knocks against Nobunaga’s shoulder, seeking the reassurance of Nobunaga’s hand. Nobunaga gives it to her as naturally as breathing, winding pale strands of hair loosely between her fingers.

“And I’m not supposed to be alive,” Nobunaga says. “You’re not supposed to remember me. You don’t see either of those things stopping us, do you?”

“That’s different.”

“How?” Nobunaga turns Okita’s head towards her. “How’s it different? Is it because you think we’re connected somehow? You’re the one who chose to come find me. What makes that any different from choosing to miss your friend?”

“I…” Okita works her jaw, searching for the harsh response that will make Nobunaga back down. But it won’t come; Nobunaga’s right, and they both know it. Nobunaga’s lips come to rest against Okita’s forehead, two burning pinpricks of warmth that chase away the tightness in her chest, both her sickness and the weighty grief of Yamanami’s blood splashing across her front.

“Come on,” Nobunaga says. She offers her other hand to Okita expectantly, hopefully. She won’t force Okita to come with her. That’s Okita’s choice alone, but a refusal means another lonely day of wandering Kyoto and its surrounding hills, a suspended existence hinging on a single factor out of her control.

“How far is it?” Okita asks her.

“Don’t worry about it. I’ll carry you.”

“How do you expect us to get out of here?”

“Um…” Nobunaga shoots an uneasy glance at the window. “Maybe the front door.”

“You really think that’ll work?”

“You really haven’t been out much at all, have you.” Nobunaga sighs and untangles herself from Okita, crouching next to her and gesturing for Okita to climb onto her back. “There’s no one downstairs. Your guys have been having trouble keeping things together. Ever since you moved locations, your response times have been slower. Have you noticed that?”

“I’ll have to bring it up with Hijikata.”

“And say what? A little birdy told you?” Nobunaga laughs fondly, rolling her shoulders. “Come on. We’re wasting daylight.”

“Then why’d you bother climbing through my window?”

“I dunno, doesn’t that seem more romantic than taking the stairs?”

“I can’t stand you,” Okita sighs. “And don’t—” Her hand fumbles around the side of Nobunaga’s face, trying to clamp her palm over her mouth. “—even think about saying anything funny.”

“Wouldn’t dream about it,” Nobunaga replies, her words garbled by Okita’s fingers. A playful nip gets Okita to retreat with a yelp.

True to Nobunaga’s word, the bottom floor of the Shinsengumi quarters is mostly empty. The walls murmur with voices from distant corridors, none of which Nobunaga pays any mind to. She orients herself with the nearest set of temple gates, and moves towards the east.

It’s nearly summer, the air growing thick with moisture and the drone of cicadas. Nobunaga shakes some sweat off her forehead, arms wrapped tight around Okita’s legs. Something tickles her hair- Okita’s fingers, plucking loose cherry blossom petals from where they land and sending them off in the wind.

They break off from the main city and head for the bridge nearest Gion. Snowmelt from the late thaw brings the river up to its edges. The reeds where she and Okita had met are nearly submerged; they’ll surface in the lull between now and the coming of the summer rains, and then be lost to the floods. For now, the river is a shifting mass of white and blue and pink, cherry blossoms scattered across the reflection of the open sky.

“We haven’t been here in a while,” Okita says. Her chin settles on Nobunaga’s shoulder, her mouth by Nobunaga’s ear. “I don’t think I actually remember the last time— any of me, I mean.”

“We haven’t,” Nobunaga agrees. For her, too, this is her first visit in so long. “We’re almost there.”

“Are you taking me up to the shrine? I heard they have pretty good views there.”

“Close, but not quite.” Nobunaga turns off the main road, now letting memory carry her feet where recognition will fail. The thing about being immortal— at least muscle memory won’t change, even if a city does.

Even in a tightly-packed place such as this, no trees along the streets save for the ones leading up to the temple, the stones are still littered with cherry blossoms. A trail of vivid pink, leading Nobunaga and Okita down twisting alleyways, coming and going with the seasons but as old and unchanged as Nobunaga. They will be here since before Nobunaga’s walked Kyoto, and perhaps long after, too.

“Alright, here we go.” Nobunaga slows to a stop in front of a two-story shop with broad windows, its face directed over Kyoto’s twin rivers and the florid hills. She drops to one knee, palms flat on the ground, to let Okita down from her back. “Hurry, you’re murdering my spine. They should call you that, spine-killer. It sounds way better than manslayer.”

“Do you ever stop to think about how dumb you sound, Nobu?”

“Nope! Never. If I did, you’d never have all the cool speeches I made.” Nobunaga dusts off her knees and straightens her coat, beaming at Okita. “So? What do you think?”

In a way, this is as much a test of Okita’s memory as Nobunaga’s. They haven’t been to this tea house in so long, and yet Okita still hesitates to step forward, fingers brushing the weathered doorway with a tinge of disbelief. “You brought me here?” she asks. “You remembered?”

“Well, yeah. It’s your favorite place, isn’t it?”

“Best tea in Kyoto.” Okita laughs at her own words, leaving her mouth for the first time. “Still think that’s true?”

“Let’s find out.”

Nobunaga extends a hand to Okita, fingers spread. Okita’s slot neatly between them, pulling steadily, the two of them disappearing into the tea house. Around them and in the city, the rain of cherry blossoms continues: a storm of pink strengthened by the long winter, turning Kyoto into less a city of wooden shingles than flowered rooftops.

* * *

**1867**

Okita is changed. It feels like that should be a given; carrying a disease that can burden you for a day just as easily as it neglects you for weeks at a time would rattle even the strongest of souls. With Okita, it’s a subtle shifting, easily missed. The Commander and Vice-Commander haven’t noticed it. It’s why Okita’s out in the cold, scarf wound tight around her face, Shinsengumi haori poking out beneath layers of clothing. Her smile and easy stance mask the labor of her chest, growing ever shallower, from everyone’s eyes but Nobunaga’s. She knows Okita too well to mistake the leanness of her body for muscle or the pallid shadows beneath her eyes as a failing of the light.

“It won’t be long,” Okita says. Nobunaga’s hands work through the folds of her scarf yet another time, fussing with how they fall over her shoulders. Okita must go, but Nobunaga keeps asking moment after moment from her. Neither of them would ever forget the promise that continues to draw them together, but Nobunaga wonders if Okita remembers how it was made. Nobunaga’s never asked her, and they’ve never spoken of it.

A rebellion with its roots in the west; a promise made of the naivety that inevitably accompanies peace. Nobunaga had never known it, but now she does. She kisses Okita as if she might draw its weight from her lips, take it on herself, a burden for the dead to spare the living.

“Take as long as you need,” Nobunaga tells her. “But come back.”

“You know I will,” Okita says. The heat of her breath tickles Nobunaga’s cheek, draws a silver cloud against the morning sky.

“Alive.” Nobunaga’s hands fist in the ends of her scarf. She can’t bear to let Okita go. She’s seen so many soldiers off to war, commanded them herself, but this is one departure she can’t bring herself to allow. Time has worn her edges down, and peace has made her complacent. “If you don’t, I’ll find whoever was responsible and—”

Nobunaga’s voice catches on a lump in her throat. _ And burn them_, she’d meant to say. _ I haven’t burned anything in a long while_, but that’s not true. Time has worn away more than just her guard, and the thought of Okita leaving dredges a rare rawness to her surface.

“Nobu?” Okita’s palms brush the backs of Nobunaga’s hands. Her head dips, but Nobunaga can’t bring herself to meet Okita’s eyes. Now isn’t the time to weigh Okita down with her own doubts. She’s selfish; she’s the Demon King, and what she wants now more than anything is Okita happy, Okita alive.

“Nobu, what’s wrong?” Okita leans down, searching for a hint in the watery gleam of Nobunaga’s eyes. “Tell me.”

“Before,” Nobunaga mumbles before she can stop herself. “When we met. You remember what I said?”

“When we— oh.” Okita’s mouth goes slack, a long breath passing from her like a sigh. “Oh. Nobu, no. That wasn’t you.”

“How can you be sure?”

“Because you’d never hurt me.” Okita brings the end of her scarf up to Nobunaga’s face, trying to tease a smile out from her cheeks. “It wasn’t you that night.”

“But your arms, when I pulled you out—”

“From the wood that fell on top of me.” Okita leans down, leaves a kiss on the bridge of Nobunaga’s nose. “I promise.”

“Forget that.” Nobunaga musters up a smile, thin and wan but there nonetheless. “If you’re gonna promise me anything, promise me what I asked for. You back here, alive.”

“Alright,” Okita says. “But you have to promise me not to burn the city down while I’m gone.”

Nobunaga’s heart clenches, drops, writhes in the pit of her stomach. “I won’t,” she mumbles into fistfuls of Okita’s traveling cloak. “I promise.”

“Then neither of us have anything to worry about. Right?” Okita beams at her, the missing light of the autumn sun coming off her smile. Nobunaga steps forward, arms wrapping tight around Okita’s back. Her head slots under Okita’s chin as if it’s where it’s belonged, forever and since.

“Yeah,” Nobunaga mumbles into her chest, the thumping of Okita’s heartbeat her reply. Measured, unhurried, as certain as time and Okita’s return. Hearing it to the rustling of the falling leaves, she feels as though, for once, there’s a chance Okita might be right.

* * *

**1868**

Nobunaga misses the streak of blue among the pale reflection of the sky against the frost. She’s sending her breath up in clouds to raid the heavens, or else to encompass the distant outlines of Kyoto’s many temples. Her promise to Okita mentions nothing of imagined smoke— take that, Honnouji, she puffs into the breeze.

“Um… excuse me?”

The sudden voice sends Nobunaga nearly toppling off the stump she’s made her seat. Her hand, halfway to her katana, goes still as she rises.

The man in front of her must be no more than a footsoldier, sleeves drooping past the tightly-wound tasuki, the hem of the haori far past his hips. Not a man, then, a boy, the light in his eyes still bright and not fully quenched. Nobunaga imagines he’d be no older than Nobukatsu as she remembers him— uncertain, subservient, as eager to jump to orders as to try and prove himself. Only the collapsing edge of victory would draw such boys into its grasp. How desperate must they be, Nobunaga wonders, if they’re drawing half-grown men and half-dead samurai to fight for them?

“What is it?” Nobunaga snaps. Her voice blends easily with the winter cold. Fear howls like an inferno in her belly. Okita, in her right mind, would never have directed the Shinsengumi towards Nobunaga. Something must’ve happened, and if Okita is gone—

“You… you know Okita Souji, right?” the boy asks. Nobunaga nods sharply, eyes piercing like swords. “She’s asked you to come see her.”

“Okita? Is she alright?”

“She, um.” The boy shifts his weight nervously, paling under Nobunaga’s stare. “I think it might be better if you saw for yourself.”

“Fine.” Nobunaga gestures impatiently, already beginning to head back down the hill. “Let’s go. Hurry it up.”

The trek back down into Kyoto takes far longer than it should. Another long winter has settled itself over the valley, blanketing it with snow. It’s all Nobunaga can do to keep her restlessness from pouring out over it, from shattering the quiet and her promise to Okita with a trail blazed by fire. She plods along in the shin-deep snow, each labored step an agony. The moment Nobunaga’s boots touch down on solid stone, she’s off in a sprint, not bothering to pretend she doesn’t know where she’s going. It’s not as if the location of the Shinsengumi’s base is some carefully guarded secret, but even if it were, that wouldn’t matter. Nobunaga runs until she feels her fire in her lungs, burning up what air she manages to gasp for herself, and sends tendrils lancing towards her heart in search for more.

As she runs, Nobunaga tries to think back. The city is still restless; the Shinsengumi are still away. If they’d sent a whelp to come get her, their forces must be limited. They’re still out fighting, but Okita is back; probably injured or ill. Nobunaga stumbles around a corner, catches herself on a wall, keeps running. This won’t be another late arrival, too ineffectual to do anything for Okita. Nobunaga will make it in time; she has to.

Nobunaga tears down the final few blocks and into the compound, driven as furiously as storm winds. A pause by the door tells her everything else she needs to know. The sound of coughing is audible even there, resonating from the rearmost room, and with it the sound of Okita’s troubled breathing. Nobunaga yanks the sliding door aside, staggers in, lets unsteady legs yield at last by Okita’s bedside. Between the run and her coat, she’s far too warm, but that doesn’t stop Nobunaga from enveloping Okita in her arms and hiding her face in her neck. The tremor of her chest speaks of everything that Nobunaga can’t put words to: terror, relief, and now a more subtle fear. Okita’s been away long enough for some drastic change to happen, and Nobunaga knows nothing of it.

“Nobu,” Okita whispers. So much is wrapped up in that murmur of her name. Happiness, resignation. She nuzzles the top of Nobunaga’s head, chest fluttering unevenly. Nobunaga clings to her, each touch of hers carrying a hundred questions, most of which will have no absolute answer.

Nobunaga starts simple: “What happened?” she says, peering up at Okita’s face. She’s paler, and it’s not just the colors of winter refracting off her skin. “Why are you back?”

“The Commander— Kondo— he got shot,” Okita tells her. She sighs, inhales, that breath soon torn apart by a fit of wracking coughs. She clamps a hand to her mouth, but not quick enough for Nobunaga to spot blood dribbling from her lip: Okita, like the war, has taken a turn for the worse. “I was staying with him in Osaka Castle when this started happening.” Okita gestures with her now-opened palm, glimmering with fresh crimson. “There’s no room on the front lines for someone who can’t fight.”

“So they sent you back here.” Nobunaga settles herself beside Okita’s futon, pressing on her shoulders. Okita sways, touches down gently on the futon with Nobunaga’s head tucked against her chest.

“They knew you’d go stir-crazy if you missed me too much.” Okita’s laughter tickles Nobunaga’s bangs, throwing them up into a careless peak. So close to Okita, Nobunaga hears the murmur of her breath before Okita’s coughed it out into the open. Each shudder is its own struggle for more air. All Nobunaga can do is lie there, wait for it to pass; the Demon King made powerless, she understands now what Okita must feel like, but for her there’s no reprieve. The only thing remotely close to a cure would be the very thing that Nobunaga dreads.

“Nobu?” Okita’s hand finds its way to Nobunaga’s hat. A sweep of her fingers brushes it aside, enough that Okita can bury her face in Nobunaga’s hair, taking in the scent of the winter she can no longer stand and gunpowder long since burned. “I don’t think I’ll be going to visit you for a while.”

“That’s fine,” Nobunaga says. She understands what it is neither of them can bring themselves to say. “I’ll come visit you, then. I mean, you’ve kind of been doing all the legwork for— how long, now?” She laughs, the rumble of her chest resonating with the darkened sky, a rippling of ice-laden clouds like breathing.

Okita giggles too, gravelly and abrupt. Her softness that Nobunaga knew is gone, lost in the first days of winter. What’s left is a shadow of brighter days, no less precious, but lacking. The fatigue audible in Okita’s voice wears away at Nobunaga’s heart, leaves it mournful and aching. And yet, it will never match what Okita knows, this slow fading from the world that’s more a disappearance than a death.

“I’m glad you’re here,” Okita murmurs. “You have no idea how much I missed you.”

“Missing me? You must’ve been stuck with some really annoying company. Well, getting shot does that to some people, you know.”

“I’m being serious, Nobu.” A glance at Okita tells Nobunaga that her eyes are closed; she’s hiding herself away, both from the world and Nobunaga. “I just wanted to see you at least one more time.”

“Before what?” Nobunaga asks, fumbling for one of Okita’s hands— to hold it, to feel her pulse, to do something. “You’re not dying right now, are you?”

“No,” Okita says. “But I’m going to soon. We both know this. I’m not going to ask you to stay.”

“And why not?” demands Nobunaga, even as she already knows the reason why. Okita is selfless; she knows the acute pain that comes with loss, Yamanami’s blood on her hands, and would never subject Nobunaga to that. In a way, a distant way from centuries ago, she’s right. A fate like hers would be, in Nobunaga’s time, considered even less than a mercy. But this isn’t Nobunaga’s time, nor her world. This is hardly her Kyoto, but this is her Okita. “Isn’t it clear by now? Nothing’s going to make me want to leave you. Don’t you get it?”

Okita’s smile widens, her next breath coming in a gentle sigh. She’d known what Nobunaga’s answer would be all along, but still given her that choice. Dead or not, Nobunaga is still alive in Okita.

“I really thought we might have a good chance this time,” Okita whispers. “Maybe someday things will turn out alright.”

“Hey, don’t say that.” Nobunaga reaches over, tapping Okita’s cheek with a finger. “There’s no giving up around the Demon King. We’ll figure something out,” she says. She means it: there’s not a single thing Oda Nobunaga’s said that she’s doubted.

But they don’t. The winter crumbles as the front of sprouting life pushes northward, following the war. The thaw brings the grey of spring drizzles and smoke from the temples. Flowers rise from soil watered with blood, no more hardy than the men who fell where they grow.

This, Nobunaga sees from Okita’s window. Sometimes, when Okita has the strength to join Nobunaga, they look out over the hills together, all thoughts of Okita’s sickness forgotten until Nobunaga remembers that the cherry blossom trees haven’t flowered yet, and the stains on Okita’s hakama are not their petals like she’d believed.

When the cherry blossom front arrives, it’s early. It comes in the lull between the seasons and their storms, when the moisture in the air is just reaching the point where it renders Okita bedridden. Nobunaga leaves her room on those days when she’s asleep to wander Kyoto’s streets, catching pink petals in her hat to throw over Okita, who laughs, who swallows one by accident and jokes it’s her dessert (for Nobunaga to collect the next time Okita’s asleep, their withered sweetness mixing with the cloying scent that no longer leaves Okita’s room, before she goes out to begin again).

Spring passes in a blur, and with it goes the Shinsengumi’s Commander. Okita doesn’t have the strength to cry at the news, but she tries. She extracts the toll from her body in blood with Nobunaga’s arms around her, and dwindles while the heavens pour out their tears in her stead.

It couldn’t have lasted forever, Nobunaga knows. She’d put that thought off for so long, looked at Okita every day and thought, _ this isn’t the end yet_. She’d allowed herself to forget that there must always be an end.

It isn’t until noon that Nobunaga realizes the truth. Okita sleeps in frequently these days, but never this late. She knows what it’s like to be afraid to touch Okita, but never like this, because Okita’s still warm. Between the sun coming in through the window and the summer humidity, it’s as if she’s still alive. Only the lack of her coughing and her absent pulse suggest the opposite. Nobunaga kneels beside Okita on the tatami, numbed legs held in place by the gravity of her grief. It’s all she can do to manage taking Okita up in her arms, so light, so much of her body lost to her illness that it’s a wonder her soul had stayed the same, helping Nobunaga forget.

But that’s Okita— selfless to the last. Nobunaga takes her from the silent building and into the streets, heading up into the hills. Okita’s head knocks against Nobunaga’s chest with every step, hair tickling her cheeks, the sun in her eyes. It feels as though at any moment she should wake up, flailing at Nobunaga, demanding to be put down, but she remains motionless. There’s not even a silence to accompany Nobunaga up the grassy slopes, the droning of cicadas deafening in her ears. Far above Gion, Nobunaga finally thinks to look back, and understands. Okita is gone as much as Kyoto is, this world she finds herself in no more familiar than the distant lands across the sea that she’d once dreamed of.

* * *

**1887**

The cherry blossoms come and go, always a shade too light or dark, never enough for Nobunaga’s searching eyes. Look as she does, the streets of Kyoto remain unknown to her. No flash of color draws her attention as it once did. Ieyasu’s descendant surrenders his title, and the last of Nobunaga’s work passes into memory. The winter days stretch longer, bridging into night.

The world turns on, trading out wood for steel. One night, Nobunaga passes beneath a pool of orange she feels no kinship with, and sees nothing but cobblestones where her boots should be. A lift and twist of her hand reveals only black sky, no stars. A thousand lamps on metal poles drown out the last familiar sight in Kyoto.

Nobunaga departs for the hills with not even a twisting of snow to announce she’s left. No one in Kyoto would have thought it of consequence anyway. The only thing in this place that remains for Nobunaga is up in the eastern hills, far from human eyes.

The wind whispers to Nobunaga as she walks, caressing silvery moonlight over her lips. It knows as well as Nobunaga the path she’s taking, up to a place she goes more frequently than the city. Nobunaga stops at a tree far older than herself, a worn piece of black fabric tied around one of its drooping branches, incoherent slash marks in its trunk the only other thing to distinguish it from the others.

Silence reigns over the snow-capped hills. This isn’t the highest place Nobunaga could find, but it’s the one she knows. It’s where, so long ago, the world had shifted in a different way and become a little warmer, a little less empty.

Nobunaga places her hand to the trunk, or thinks she does. She can’t really tell now, between the moonlight refracting off the surrounding snow and the heaviness of her own eyelids. She’s known Kyoto so well and for so long, and Okita with it. They’ve had their time, and now it’s passed. The fate of this world must be written by those who can look to the future, and not by its dead. Apparently, Okita’s agreed. Nobunaga lets her eyes slide shut, the darkness overtaking her. She won’t flee from it like the living; she welcomes it. Somewhere in it must be Okita, moved on, no longer needing to come after Nobunaga. Somewhere in it is rest. Nobunaga lets herself fall forward into it. What she meets is not the cold of the snow, nor some inexplicable warmth. What she finds is the silence the city hadn’t given to her, a welcome stillness, a dimming of the light.


	6. A Dream Within a Dream

The lantern lights of Kyoto twinkle in time with the stars, pinpricks of light in the perpetual twilight of the sky and the rolling reds floating over the surface of the river. Nobunaga wakes, as she had long ago, in the dirt behind a shrine at the outskirts of the city. It takes a moment for her to place her surroundings: Kyoto hasn’t looked like this since Nobunaga died.

Nobunaga creeps out into the light slowly, hesitant to let it touch her. It’s an unnecessary caution. This light is as welcoming as the old city, flame wreathed in paper, a warmth that Nobunaga knows. More than that, Nobunaga realizes, she knows this world. This world is hers. She hasn’t so much died as slipped back where she belongs, shedding her tether to reality and returning to this place she’d once thought to be a dream.

The streets of Kyoto brim with shadows and the hum of voices. Nobunaga watches them pass: a thousand faces, unrecognized, unknown to her. Imaginations of her mind, nameless companions to give this world some semblance of being lived in. Fleetingly— not seriously, her taste for fire has been long since wrung out of her— she imagines what it might to watch the city be consumed in its entirety.

At least the thought’s entertaining. Nobunaga laughs and walks on, her gaze draped over the hills, a jumble of life and color. The seasons haven’t decided what they’d like to be, and tangled themselves into a mess of leaves and flowers on the wind, itself sharp but mellowed by the tangible warmth in the air.

Nobunaga reaches the edge of the river and slides down its banks. Mud flecks against her greaves, and she ignores it. Rolling up her sleeves, she plunges both hands into the rushing water. It’s cold, as usual, but nothing more. Her hands remain as solid as anyone looking at them through water could expect. A firefly, curious, ambles over and lands on the edge of Nobunaga’s cap, flashing inarticulate questions.

“Is this where everyone ends up when they die?” Nobunaga asks it. “Is there anyone I know here?”

The firefly keeps blinking. It’s just a firefly. Well, Nobunaga thinks with a sigh, that’s not the stupidest thing she’s ever done. It’s not like anyone was around to see that, anyway.

Nobunaga rises and shakes her dripping hands dry. If she’s not a spirit anymore, maybe now she can leave. Nobunaga runs to the nearest bridge and leaps atop its railing, scanning the landscape. It’s always been a bit harder to tell the shape of Kyoto in the night, but the slopes where Gion is built point the way: she’s on the banks of the western river, and to her distant right she’ll find the southern gate of Kyoto.

No one pays Nobunaga any mind as she sprints down the side streets, cape snapping behind her, a solitary firefly still clinging persistently to her hat. Maybe this place is used to eccentrics like Nobunaga, or else everything Nobunaga does is ordinary because this is Nobunaga’s mind— it would be one of those two. She staggers to a stop at the boundary of the main road, gazing out towards the horizon: further south is Nagoya, her old home, where she might find the shadow of the man her younger brother had always struggled to live as. Or Osaka, where Monkey had set up his castle, where Chacha would be.

Nobunaga rolls her shoulders, tilts her neck from one side to the other. Now here’s a genuinely unfamiliar feeling: excitement, the thrill of setting out to— well, not so much conquer this time, but explore. As if having sensed her resolve, the firefly on Nobunaga’s hat finally crawls off its brim and takes flight, a flashing yellow lantern against the splayed-out sky. Nobunaga gives it a wave. How silly, she chides herself, how sentimental. Still, she can’t bring herself to look away. She turns and watches it head back towards the city, drifting with the currents of the wind until a sharp gust buffets it out of sight behind a thick swirl of cherry blossoms.

Dark enough to still be pink, light enough to let the golden light of the sun or lanterns glint off their fragile forms. The petals are the right shade of pink. Nobunaga’s chest seizes with sudden violence. She wants so much to chase after them, but there’s no need to. Not all the petals escape; some tangle in a black bow and flaxen hair, nestle in the folds of an equally pink kimono. “Really?” a light voice says, drawing out a tremble of Nobunaga’s jaw. “You were going to leave without me?”

Nobunaga surges forward. Her greaves sound in sharp cracks as she runs across the stone. Her head thumps hard against Okita’s chest; she presses her ear against it. She takes in the sound of Okita’s breathing, full and uninterrupted, just as Okita’s fingers push her hat up and nestle in her hair. Nobunaga buries her face in Okita’s kimono and breathes her in, the sweet scent of spring air that the Kyoto she’d left behind had choked out with its tight-packed buildings. This is no lie or dream; this is Okita. Nobunaga turns her head from side to side, wiping the burning pinpricks forming at the corners of her eyes; through the heaving of her chest, she gasps out, “How?”

“There wasn’t anyone I could come back as.” Okita’s voice sounds different, just a little bit. A tangle of older inflections with the voice Nobunaga knows best. “But then I felt you.”

“Can you stay?” Nobunaga’s fingers dig in tighter along the kimono’s seams. Okita’s fingers strum her scalp, more reassuring than Okita could ever know.

“I’m staying,” Okita says. “It’d be kind of a waste for me to go back and try to find you now, right?”

Nobunaga nods, sharp and tight beneath Okita’s chin. Okita leans down, careful and deliberate, and touches her lips to Nobunaga’s forehead. Nobunaga startles, but only briefly. She tilts her head up, decisive as ever, one hand pressed to Okita’s cheek to guide her as Nobunaga kisses her. It’s heat like Nobunaga, now devoid of her fire, has never known; it’s the softness that she’s missed so dearly. Okita’s eyes sink shut, and Nobunaga’s, too— they stand in the middle of the street for so long that perhaps another age or two pass by them. They part with reddened cheeks and pupils blown wide, hands joined with threaded fingers.

“Where were you going?” Okita asks her. She puts Nobunaga’s hat back in place, patting it securely.

“Nagoya,” Nobunaga says. “To see if I could leave this city. To find my brother.”

“Can I come with you?”

“Why would I ever say no?” Nobunaga tugs Okita towards the gate, looking up at its towering posts. Beyond it, the world stretches on towards the light of the mellowed sun, casting purples and reds up as it sets, but never fades. “I wonder if it’ll still be the same.”

“Maybe we’ll get to find out.”

“Yeah,” Nobunaga says. Her hand grips tighter around Okita’s, gets a gentle squeeze in reply. “Together?”

“On three,” Okita agrees.

“Alright. One.” Nobunaga glances at Okita. The setting sun is wound in her hair, more brilliant than any gilding or fire. Her eyes, not settled on Nobunaga, reflect the softened sunlight. Okita’s looking forward to this too, Nobunaga realizes. She’s only seen as much of the world as she’d chosen to, and she’d always chosen Nobunaga. “Two.”

“Three,” they say together. Nobunaga pulls on Okita, and Okita does the same, stepping out into the watchful dusk.

The sun and Kyoto to their back, they continue southward.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _I want to be enraptured by you for eternity  
I want to touch you for all eternity,  
Farewell, farewell,  
From season to season_
> 
> \--------------------------------
> 
> So if you would believe it or not there's been one more project that kinda got splashed by the song that insipired this so that'll be coming later.
> 
> I've been meaning to write something for After the Rain's ['Shikioriori ni Tayutotte'](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M7sr5zv1EkI) for a while but I could never make the plot work out, until I got the idea to interpret the lyrical seasons as lives, with one person being immortal and the other constantly reincarnating to meet them again. The ending was also supposed to be different but about 3/5 of the way through corgasbord and I thought that using Chaldea again was copping out so I ended up going with something closer to the lyrics as well. 
> 
> About 3 weeks removed from actually finishing this, I feel like this is actually one of the strongest things I've put out, so thanks to everyone who's read it to the end.


End file.
